LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf... 

UNITED STATES OE AMERICA. 



BEYOND THE GRAVE 



by / 
DR. HERMANN CREMER 

PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GREIFSWALD 



TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 

BY 

THE REV. SAMUEL T. LOWRIE, D.D. 

PASTOR OF THE EWING PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEAR TRENTON, N J. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BY 

THE REV. A. A. HODGE, D.D. 

PROFESSOR OF DIDACTIC AND POLEMIC THEOLOGY 
PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 



- 






NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1886 



\^ 



Copyright, 1885, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved, 



The Library 
of Congrh SS 

washington 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Translator's Preface v 

Author's Preface xi 

Introduction xiii 

A Dark Problem which only God's Word can Solve . 8 

I. 

A Clear Word of Prophecy 12 

The Future Easter Morning 13 

Redemption more than Immortality 16 

Death not a Debt of Nature 21 

Eternal Life 24 

Why was Mention of a Resurrection so long delayed 

in Scripture ? , 29 

Hades 29 

Hades the Porch of Heaven for Old Testament Saints. 36 
Why a Hades for all the Dead before Christ ? . . 40 
A Change beyond the Grave when Christ came . . 42 
Why Old Testament Saints said so Little of Bliss 

beyond the Grave 44 

Expectation of Christ became Expectation of Resur- 
rection 48 



IV CONTENTS. 

II. 

PAGE 

Paradise Opened 52 

What Christ's Resurrection Means 55 

The New Epoch of Life 62 

Resurrection Guaranteed by Inward Experience . 65 

Bliss Possible while awaiting Resurrection ... 71 

Hope of Resurrection promotes Sanctification . . 72 

How Are the Dead Raised ? 73 

The Resurrection of the Wicked 78 

III. 

Resurrection Delayed that the Gospel may be 

Preached 81 

The Present Blessedness of Heaven 83 

What Makes a Blessed Death ? 89 

How are the Souls of Believers at Death made Per- 
fect in Holiness ? 93 

Are these Degrees of Blessedness ? 97 

What now of Unbelievers beyond the Grave ? . . 99 
Do the Torments of the Lost disturb the Bliss of 

the Redeemed ? 102 

Will There be a Restoration of All Things ? . . .103 

Is Conversion after Death possible ? 104 

The Death of Little Children 119 

Concerning Spiritualism . .131 

Index 145 

Texts 151 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



THE title of the little book herewith pre- 
sented to the public in an English transla- 
tion is in the original as follows : " Concern- 
ing the State after Death; together with 
some Intimations Concerning the Death of 
Children, and Concerning Spiritualism!' 
This inconvenient title has been exchanged 
for a more attractive and equally descrip- 
tive one, given by the Author to a pre- 
vious work, as noticed in his Preface which 
follows. The latter not having appeared 
in an English translation, there is not the 
same need of employing a new title for 
the present book. 

Though this little book was published 
in Germany (Gutersloh, C Bertelsmann) in 



VI TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. . 

1883, the Translator only became acquaint- 
ed with it in February of the present year. 
To read it was to have immediately the 
desire to prepare a translation of it for 
English readers, and a request was com- 
municated to the Author for his permis- 
sion to do so. Meanwhile, assuming that 
there would be no difficulty, especially that 
the request had not been anticipated in 
any quarter, the translation was undertaken 
and finished in a few weeks, and before re- 
ceiving the Author's reply. 

The letter to Dr. Cremer found him, 
alas ! at the death-bed of his second son, 
a young man of eighteen years. Thus he 
was actually needing, and doubtless expe- 
riencing also, the virtue of those consola- 
tions of the God of all comfort, wherewith, 
in this little book, he had been richly com- 
forting in God others that had like trouble. 

In the reply thus delayed, Dr. Cremer 
expressed his appreciation of the estimate 
put on his little book, adding that it had 
already enjoyed an exceedingly friendly re- 



TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. Vll 

ception in foreign lands, of which he had 
convincing proof in the appearance of a 
Swedish translation. Respecting the re- 
quest for permission to translate it into 
English, he replied that " some months 
ago he had received a letter from the Rev. 
Geo. Z. Gray, D.D., Dean of the Episcopal 
Theological School, Cambridge, Mass., re- 
questing him to give his approval of a 
translation into English, which he had ac- 
cordingly given. Thus he was not in posi- 
tion to give approval to another transla- 
tion. Otherwise it would have given him 
pleasure to do so." 

Having received this reply, the Trans- 
lator immediately communicated by letter 
with Dr. Gray, stating the situation, who, 
in his courteous reply, said, "I feel un- 
willing to stand in the way, as you have 
done so much of the work, or to insist on my 
prior right. Therefore I will withdraw." 

It is a pleasure to acknowledge this 
courtesy, and the gratification the Trans- 
lator has enjoyed in executing the work 



viii translator's preface. 

thus resigned makes him appreciate Dr. 
Gray's withdrawal as an act of great gener- 
osity. Gratefully accepting this courtesy, 
he desires also to express his obligation to 
the publishers for producing the work in 
so attractive a form. 

The Translator takes pleasure in ac- 
knowledging his indebtedness for the fa- 
vor conferred by the Rev. A. A. Hodge, 
D.D., Professor of Didactic and Polemic 
Theology in Princeton Theological Semi- 
nary, in writing, at his request, an Intro- 
duction to the present work. The expe- 
diency and propriety of this Introduction 
will vindicate themselves. It is not im- 
proper, however, to remark, that the Trans- 
lator shares the views of the Author (page 
41) that are criticised in the Introduction. 
The criticism, on the other hand, is most 
welcome. It will cause the matter in ques- 
tion to be the more carefully scrutinized, 
and, like the light of the torch, which " the 
more it's shook it shines," so it will be with 
the truth in this matter, whatever it is. 



TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. IX 

Much that might have been proper for 
this Preface appears in the Introduction ; 
it is only necessary, therefore, to add the 
following notice to the reader : 

The original of this book is divided into 
only three sections, which may be detect- 
ed on pages 12, 52, and 81 ; on which fol- 
low the two supplements, " The Death of 
Little Children,'' page 119, and " Concern- 
ing Spiritualism," page 131. The present 
form, as broken into small chapters, with 
the headings attached, is .the Translator's 
work. This device, like the translation it- 
self, seemed essential to an English liter- 
ary form ; for English readers are as like- 
ly to revolt at a succession of unbroken 
pages, as much as at the long -extended 
sentences that seem quite acceptable to 
German readers. 

Samuel T. Lowrie, 

Ewing Manse, near Trenton, N. J., 
October, 1885. 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



FOR a number of years the publisher 
of my little book, entitled " Beyond the 
Grave " (Jenseits des Grades), which ap- 
peared in 1868, has wished me to prepare a 
new elaboration of it. It is only now that 
I have found it possible to do so. In my 
lecture (Barmen, 1870) on "The Resurrec- 
tion of the Dead," I have not only treated 
especially the subject of the hope of resur- 
rection, but also brought together nearly 
all the intimations, hints, and sayings of 
Holy Scripture concerning the state after 
death, and attempted to answer the ques- 
tions thereby suggested in connection with 
what we know of faith and salvation. In 
view of these changes I have chosen a 



Xll PREFACE. 

somewhat modified title.* The present title 
may, at the same time, with respect to the 
friendly offering of the Danish physician 
and professor, Dr. Hornemann (" Concern- 
ing the Condition of Man shortly before 
Death"), serve as an admonition not to 
forget what is after death, so far as we can 
know about it. 

Greifswald, August, 1883. 

[* The Author entitles his present production " The 
State after Death." We have preferred for its English 
form the title of his original production. — Tr.] 



INTRODUCTION. 



The Author of this book, Dr. H. Cremer, 
is one of the very foremost of the decided- 
ly evangelical scholars of Germany. He 
is Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the 
University of Greifswald, in Northern Prus- 
sia ; he is associated with such well-known 
men as Luthardt, of Leipsic, Strack, of Ber- 
lin, Volck and Harnack, of Dorpat, Von 
Scheele, of Upsala, in the authorship of 
Zockler's " Manual of Theological Science. " 
The work by which he is best known is his 
very learned and valuable " Biblico-Theolog- 
ical Lexicon of the New Testament," which 
is now proceeding to its fourth edition. He 
stands very high in the estimation of Eng- 
lish and American scholars for learning, 
judgment, and evangelical spirit. 

The doctrine of this little book, with one 
exception clearly noted by the Translator, 
is perfectly in accord with the straitest 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

standards of orthodoxy, and yet we be- 
lieve that its contents will be found fresh 
and interesting to all intelligent readers. 
To be fresh and instructive within the realm 
of revealed truth, it is not necessary, as it 
is not permitted, to present matter abso- 
lutely original. It is sufficient that the 
matter of revelation, as old as the Bible it- 
self, should be presented in some new meas- 
ure of accuracy, fulness, and power. The 
special advantage of the present treatise 
results from the acknowledged learning, 
judicial balance and candor of its eminent 
Author, and from the purely biblical non- 
speculative character of his method. The 
special studies of Dr. Cremer, which have 
rendered him in his department an author- 
ity recognized throughout the Christian 
world, qualify him for presenting an accu- 
rate statement of the real biblical teaching 
on this subject in the light of the most pro- 
found and comprehensive modern scholar- 
ship. This will be found to be highly re- 
assuring, in view of the unsettling character 
of much of the pretentious learning and 
speculation of the present time. 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

The method of this treatise is rather that 
of biblical than of systematic theology. 
Systematic theology sums up, in a system 
of general conceptions and definitions, all 
that the Scriptures teach on every point 
upon which it declares the mind of God. 
It is concerned rather with the substance 
of the truth than with the words used by 
the Holy Ghost to express it, or with the 
forms in which in different periods and by 
different writers it has been presented in 
the Scriptures. Biblical theology, on the 
other hand, notes more closely all the phe- 
nomena of revelation, the gradual unfolding 
of every truth through successive dispen- 
sations, the characteristic terms in which 
it has been expressed in different ages and 
by different writers, and the various points 
of view in which it has been conceived and 
exhibited by different writers under differ- 
ent historical conditions. Each of these 
distinct methods possesses its own special 
advantage ; but the method of biblical the- 
ology is comparatively very unfamiliar to 
religious people. In spite of the fact that 
the Bible is held by us to be the very 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

WORD OF God, the source of all our knowl- 
edge of divine things, and of the fact that 
a great deal of desultory study has always 
been devoted to the sacred text by Protes- 
tants, the generalized conceptions and defi- 
nitions and technical terms of systematic 
theology have to a great degree taken the 
place, in the minds of most modern Chris- 
tians, of the purely biblical language and 
form in which these truths have been sev- 
erally set forth by the Holy Ghost in his 
own word. This tendency, natural and uni- 
versal, has been intensified by the use of 
Confessions and Catechisms. For instance, 
among English-speaking Presbyterians it 
has been increased by the universal dif- 
fusion and long dominance of that most 
admirable of all statements of systematic 
theology embraced in the Westminster 
Confession and Catechisms. 

Take, for example, the subject of this 
book. The Scriptures certainly teach two 
related truths : (i) That human probation 
ends with death, and that the state into 
which the soul enters immediately after 
death is, in its essential character, to remain 



INTRODUCTION. XVU 

unchanged forever. (2) That as a final re- 
sult there are but two states — one of holi- 
ness and happiness, or one of sinfulness and 
misery — into which all the members of the 
human family are to be distributed. These 
are styled respectively Heaven and Hell, 
and are represented in Scripture, and nec- 
essarily conceived of by us, as being two 
distinct places as well as states. And the 
Westminster Confession follows Scripture 
faithfully in denying that there is any mid- 
dle place or condition (e.g., purgatory) oc- 
cupied by the disembodied spirits of men 
between death and the resurrection (ch. 32, 

From this basis of unquestionable fact 
many draw the inference that these terms 
Heaven and Hell must always have had the 
same values in the usage of all parts of 
Scripture, and that the realities signified 
by these terms respectively must always, 
through all dispensations, have remained 
unchanged. That is, that the seat of bliss 
to which the Old Testament believer went 
immediately after death must always have 
been known as heaven, and must have been 
a 



XV111 INTRODUCTION. 

identical with that state and condition into 
which the New Testament believer departs 
when he dies ; and that the heavens of the 
Old Testament believer, before the first 
coming of Christ, and that of the New 
Testament believer, during the intermedi- 
ate state between death and the resurrec- 
tion, and that of all the redeemed after the 
final judgment, are all identical in respect 
to locality and condition. 

All this involves a confusion of the dif- 
ferent stages in which believers realize re- 
demption here and hereafter, with its con- 
summation. The true state of facts as to 
the manner in which these matters are set 
forth in Scripture is as follows : 

I. The consummation of our redemption 
cannot occur until the resurrection and glo- 
rification of our bodies. The human per- 
son, subject at once of law and of redemp- 
tion, essentially consists of soul and body. 
The body is necessary to the completion 
of the personality, and consequently to the 
full enduring of the penalty, or the com- 
plete experience of salvation. These iden- 
tical bodies which have sinned and suffered 



INTRODUCTION. XIX 

here, modified but not exchanged, must be 
brought up out of the dominion of death, 
and the entire person reinstated as a child 
of God. Hence Paul says (Rom. viii. 23) 
that even we Christians who have already 
the first-fruits of the Spirit, nevertheless 
"groan within ourselves, waiting for the 
adoption, to wit, the redemption of our 
bodies." And hence the Holy Spirit, who 
now dwells in all believers, "seals them " 
not unto the heaven that comes immedi- 
ately after death, but " unto the day of re- 
demption," L e. y that day in which redemp- 
tion shall be consummated in the resurrec- 
tion and glorification of their bodies. 

The hope of the Messiah included the 
hope of the resurrection of the body, as 
Paul teaches (Acts xxiv. 14, 15; xxvi. 6). 
The earthly work of the Messiah culmi- 
nated in his own resurrection. The preach- 
ing of the gospel was the proclamation of 
the bodily resurrection of Christ, and hence 
of all his people. The work of redemption 
itself was completed in. the resurrection of 
Christ himself, and the realized redemption 
of his people is completed in the actual 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

resurrection of their own bodies. In the 
mean time the hope of the gospel is the 
hope of resurrection (Acts xxiii. 6). To 
this extent the new departure in theology, 
which denies the actual resurrection of the 
bodies of believers, is proved to be unbib- 
lical. And to this degree is the prevalent 
religious faith of the day, which lays all 
its emphasis upon the salvation of the soul 
completed immediately after death, shown 
to be defective. 

The Author has done us a great service 
in setting the resurrection of our bodies 
before us in the same prominent position 
which it occupies in the WORD OF GOD. 
The highest blessedness set before us in 
the gospel will not be attained until after 
the general resurrection. If this be so, it 
follows, that while Christians should con- 
template what awaits them immediately 
after death with confidence and joy, since 
to be " absent from the body is to be at 
home with the Lord," they should never- 
theless follow the apostolic example in 
lifting up their longing desires in anticipa- 
tion of that completed redemption which 



INTRODUCTION. XXI 

can only follow those events which shall 
accompany and succeed the Second Com- 
ing of our Lord. The whole Church, as she 
waits either on earth or in heaven, finds the 
expression of her highest aspiration in the 
closing words of Scripture, " Even so, come, 
Lord Jesus." Only then shall we " be sat- 
isfied, when we awake in his likeness. ,, 

It follows, also, that there is an Inter- 
mediate State, in which the condition of 
believing souls will be very different from 
anything they have experienced in this 
world, or will experience in their state of 
final glorification. The human soul is 
essentially constituted for personal union 
with a material body. This union condi- 
tions all its sensibilities and all its activi- 
ties. While " absent from the body," the 
spirit will be conscious, holy, happy, and 
"at home with the Lord." Nevertheless, 
this ghost life is unnatural, incomplete, 
temporary, and a consequence of sin. As 
long as it lasts, believers, though in heav- 
en, still continue as Christ w r as " till the 
third day," in part, " under the power of 
death." 



XXII INTRODUCTION. 

Whether there is an intermediate place, 
as well as an intermediate state, no living 
man knows. Location in space in such con- 
nection lies beyond all profitable thought. 
All we are told is that the believer, as soon 
as he dies, is "at home with Christ." That 
surely is enough. This is what the West- 
minster Confession calls (Larg. Cat., Ques. 
86) " the highest heavens." But whether 
the seats of bliss remain in the same place, 
absolutely or relatively to other portions 
of the physical universe, is not revealed. 
The indications of Scripture are all the 
other way. If the persons of Christ and 
his people are eternally united to material 
bodies, heaven must be a part of the ma- 
terial universe, in which the physical con- 
ditions will be adjusted to the sensibilities 
and activities of the glorified bodies they 
environ: The testimony of Scripture seems 
to be, that as the body of the saint is to be 
modified in the process of glorification, so 
the glorified home is to be constituted by 
the modification of the heavens and earth 
that are now. For we are " looking for and 
earnestly desiring the coming of the day of 



INTRODUCTION. XX111 

God, by reason of which the heavens being 
on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements 
shall melt with fervent heat. But, accord- 
ing to his promise, we look for new heav- 
ens and a new earth wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness" (2 Pet. iii. 12, 13). 

II. In a similar manner modern Chris- 
tians have generally supposed that the 
Scriptures taught that Old Testament be- 
lievers, immediately after death, w r ere trans- 
formed into the same state, and admitted 
to the same place and relations that be- 
lievers are admitted to since the death and 
resurrection of their Lord. The actual facts 
of the biblical teaching on this subject are 
as follows : 

The word HEAVEN, which occurs very 
frequently, is never used in the Old Testa- 
ment to designate the place or the condi- 
tion to which believers are introduced at 
death."* It is never used as if the subject 
designated sustained any relation to man's 
future destiny. It always designates the 

* With the single exception of Elijah (2 Kings ii. 1, 
Ii), who was, like Enoch, translated, and so delivered 
from death, the common experience of redeemed men. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 

dwelling-place of God. Heaven is his 
throne, while the earth is his footstool (Isa. 
Ixvi. i). He is always represented as reign- 
ing, looking, hearing, answering, acting, com- 
ing " from heaven/* But all men, good and 
bad, are said to go immediately to Sheol 
when they die (Dr. Hodge's " Systematic 
Theology/' pt. iv., ch. i., § 4). 

This word " Sheol " occurs sixty-five times 
in the Old Testament, and, with two or three 
exceptions, is represented by the equivalent 
term Hades in the Septuagint Greek. This 
word " Hades"* occurs also eleven times in 
the New Testament, and throughout its 
usage in both Testaments maintains a per- 
fectly plain and uniform sense. Sheol or 
Hades is the term used in the ancient dis- 
pensation by the Holy Spirit in the sense 
of the spirit-world, the invisible world, the 
land of shades, the under-world, into which 
the disembodied spirits of all men go im- 
mediately after death. It is a part of the 

* See the veiy thorough, learned, and able " Excursus 
on Hades," by Dr. Elijah R. Craven, pp. 364-377 of the 
volume on Revelation, of the " Lange-SchafI Critical and 
Doctrinal Commentary." 



INTRODUCTION. XXV 

realm of death, and residence in it is a con- 
sequence of sin. Irrespective of the atone- 
ment of Christ, its condition would be pure- 
ly penal and hopeless. To the Christless it 
was the vestibule of hell. But in view of 
his atonement and to all believers Hades 
was the vestibule of heaven, for he was 
" the Lamb that hath been slain from the 
foundation of the world " (Rev. xiii. 8). 
Hence there were in Hades separate re- 
gions and conditions of disembodied spir- 
its. A place for the good, called Abra- 
ham's bosom, or Paradise, and a place for 
the evil, Gehenna, or " Hell," in the mod- 
ern definite and exclusive sense of that 
word. And between these two places and 
conditions there was "a great gulf fixed," 
and no possible interchange, or even pass- 
age of persons from the one to the other 
(Luke xvi. 19-31). In the one condition 
they were comforted, in the other they 
were " in anguish." 

The faith and hope of the Old Testament 
believer rested on the coming of the Mes- 
siah. When he came he " should redeem 
Israel." Abraham rejoiced to see his day, 



XXVI INTRODUCTION. 

and " he saw it and was glad." As the time 
advanced, and the work of preparation for 
the Messiah drew towards completion, the 
hope of the resurrection of the body and of 
the glorification of the entire person be- 
came more definite and certain. But in 
the mean time Hades always was regarded 
as a place of gloom and imperfect shade- 
life, and death was submitted to by the Old 
Testament believer with reluctance. The 
deliverance they longed for was in the fur- 
ther future, and from Hades, not in it. 
"Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory 
rejoiceth : my flesh also shall rest in hope. 
For thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades ; 
neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to 
see corruption. Thou wilt show me the 
path of life : in thy presence is fulness of 
joy; at thy right hand are pleasures for 
evermore " (Ps. xvi. 9-11 ; xlix. 15). It in- 
volves no denial of the Messianic charac- 
ter of this psalm to affirm the obvious fact 
that in the first instance it expresses Da- 
vid's personal hope, which he shared in 
common with all believers of his age. 
The question necessarily arises, whether 



INTRODUCTION. XXV11 

these gloomy, shadowy views as to the con- 
dition of believers in the spirit-world, wait- 
ing for the coming of the Messiah, are due 
to the imperfect revelation vouchsafed to 
living believers in Old Testament times, or 
to the actual condition of believing souls in 
Hades as then constituted. Dr. Cremer in- 
sists upon the latter view exclusively ; he 
holds that " the difference between the Old 
and the New Testament prospect of exist- 
ence beyond the grave is not to be referred 
to an imperfect knowledge of the former 
concerning the life after death, but to the 
difference between the periods/' He founds 
this judgment upon the principle that the 
Old Testament believers could not have 
been actually redeemed before the redemp- 
tion-price had been actually paid by Christ 
on earth. For " until there should come 
about a rightful redemption by means of 
a valid sacrifice, death, the wages of sin, 
reigned, and with it Hades, the continua- 
tion of death, even over those who looked 
for redemption " (page 41). 

The writer of this Introduction believes 
that Dr. Cremer, as most other German 



XXV111 INTRODUCTION. 

scholars of Lutheran antecedents, greatly 
exaggerates a difference which really existed 
between the conditions of Old and of New 
Testament saints immediately after death, 
and that the ground upon which he rests 
this difference in the sentence above quoted 
is wholly unbiblical. The imperfect reve- 
lation, as compared with that of the New 
Testament, which the Old Testament saints 
enjoyed, will by itself explain much of the 
indistinctness and gloom which character- 
ized their apprehensions of death and of 
the world immediately beyond. It is, on 
the other hand, certainly taught in Script- 
ure that the then future atoning work of 
Christ, decreed and certainly foreknown, 
was made the meritorious basis of God's 
treatment of believers in Old Testament 
times, in this life and after death, just as 
really and as directly as in the case of any 
Christian since the advent. This in no de- 
gree depended upon the clearness of their 
knowledge or the brightness of their hope. 
The unconscious infant, the ignorant con- 
vert, the fearful doubter, the illuminated 
seer, the heroic martyr, all partake of the 



INTRODUCTION. XXIX 

same redemption and go to the same heav- 
en. David rested on the atonement and 
was a beneficiary of its expiating virtue, 
however little he may have understood its 
nature. " Blessed is he whose transgression 
is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed 
is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth 
not iniquity." The entire Mosaic ritual 
was a symbolic expression of the fact and 
method of salvation through the coming 
Saviour. In these rites Christ was not only 
set forth, but also really apprehended and 
enjoyed. They, as well as we, were for- 
given all their iniquities, their lives also 
were redeemed from destruction, and they 
were crowned with multitudes of loving- 
kindnesses and of tender mercies. They 
also were " saints," " holy men," and there- 
fore they were regenerated and sanctified 
as well as justified. The identity of their 
religious life with ours is conspicuously 
demonstrated by the fact that the " Psalms 
of David " have for two thousand years ex- 
pressed all the phases of the experience of 
Christians of all nationalities and of all ec- 
clesiastical parties. 



XXX INTRODUCTION". 

It is in vain to say that God was in 
" Heaven " and not in " Hades.'* In his es- 
sence God is absolutely omnipresent. Even 
on earth Old Testament believers "walked 
with God," and found him " a very present 
help in trouble," and accepted him as their 
"portion forever." Even here God dwelt 
in his holy temple, and was visibly mani- 
fested in the "shekinah." It is simply in- 
credible that the changes which believers 
underwent at and after death were of a 
retrograde order. These changes must have 
been, as are those experienced by a New 
Testament believer at his death, an ad- 
vanced stage, though only a stage, in the 
progress of redemption applied and real- 
ized. Whatever may have been the unre- 
vealed details of their condition, it is cer- 
tain that they continued to be embraced in 
the covenant of redemption, and to be go- 
ing on to experience ever more and more 
thoroughly the benefits thereby secured. 

On the other hand, it is plain that in 
the actual, personal realization of salvation 
through Christ, and all that it involves in 
its fulness, believers in " Abraham's bosom " 



INTRODUCTION. XXXI 

must have come short in much of the meas- 
ure of blessedness realized by Christians in 
what we call the intermediate state. It 
never could have been said by David or by 
Isaiah, " I am in a strait betwixt the two, 
having the desire to depart and be with 
Christ ; for it is very far better," for " we 
are willing rather to be absent from the 
body, and to be at home with the Lord." 
To us the full and satisfying conception of 
heaven is to be with Christ, the incarnate 
God. To the Old Testament believer after 
death this doubtless was a confident hope, 
but it could not have been an actual fact, 
before Christ was born and died. The en- 
trance of Christ into the abodes of the bless- 
ed dead must have revolutionized them. 
Indeed it is a significant fact that these 
abodes of the blessed dead, whatever may 
have been their locality, were never called 
" heaven" in the language of inspiration 
until after this great crisis wrought in the 
spirit-world by the entrance of the God- 
man. Christians on earth count the ages 
of their terrestrial history from the date of 
their Lord's advent in the flesh ; and just 



XXX11 INTRODUCTION. 

so, on the other side, glorified souls in the 
spirit-world count the ages of heaven from 
the date of their Lord's advent into their 
sphere immediately after his crucifixion. 

This event is expressed, agreeably to the 
language of the Old Testament, in the great 
historic creeds of Christendom as Christ's de- 
scent in inferna y or ad inferos, or elg rbv qSriv, 
i. e. y his descent into Hades. The English 
word Hell, by which Hades is represented 
in the ordinary versions of the Creed, trans- 
lated that term accurately when first used, 
but has now come to be used exclusively 
in the restricted sense of Gehenna, the place 
of the damned. But the phrase in ques- 
tion, in its true historic sense, expresses a 
plain and important truth. " Hades" is the 
Old Testament designation of the spirit- 
world, to which all men went at death, the 
good being separated from the lost by an 
impassable gulf, in a region corresponding 
to their redeemed and spiritually elevated 
condition. Yet during the residence of 
their souls in Hades, separate from their 
bodies, even believers remain partially un- 
der the power of death. The disembodied 



INTRODUCTION. XXX111 

state is so far a consequence of sin and a 
condition of incompletely realized redemp- 
tion. Now Christ must needs " taste death " 
to the dregs for us. His vicarious suffering 
includes the following stages : " He suffered 
under Pontius Pilate — was crucified — dead 
— buried — descended into Hades" So all 
his redeemed had gone before him. He 
went precisely where Abraham and all the 
true Israel w r ere waiting for him, and in so 
going he changed the redeemed side of 
Hades from being, as hitherto, the vestibule 
of heaven, into heaven itself for Old and 
New Testament saints alike.* . 

* The present writer has preferred to speak as if the 
advent of Christ merely changed the condition rather than 
the locality of his waiting Old Testament saints. It is 
by no means intended to deny the opinion of many that 
Christ did change the locality and take his people out 
of Hades into another place called Heaven. The Script- 
ures always represent Heaven as high, and Hades as 
deep. "It is as high as heaven ; what canst thou do? 
deeper than Hades ; what canst thou know " (Job xi. 8). 
It is certain that the Old Testament saints before the 
death of Christ waited in Hades. It is certain that Christ 
is now sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, and 
that all his people who have departed this life are with 
him there. 

b 



XXXIV INTRODUCTION. 

Any local agitation looking to the ex- 
purgation of this true Scriptural phrase 
from the text of the Creed of universal 
Christendom is, in our belief, wrong in prin- 
ciple, evil in effect, and without a single ar- 
gument of value in its favor. Such a move- 
ment implies a sad want of appreciation of 
the historical relations of the Church of 
Christ and of true orthodox doctrine. It 
implies a lamentable indifference to the act- 
ual and prospective union of Christendom, 
by threatening to mutilate, without ecu- 
menical consent, one of the few historic 
bonds which the distracted denominations 

Nevertheless, it appears to the writer that terms indic- 
ative of relations in space, when applied in Scripture to 
the other world, are not to be pressed in a literal sense. 
"Up" and "down" in the language of the inhabitants 
of a revolving and rotating sphere must be metaphorical. 
They probably express ideas of brightness and hope, or 
depression and apprehension, as entertained by persons 
occupying our earthly point of view. 

We mean neither to affirm nor to deny that Christ took 
his people out of one place to another. We affirm that 
whereas they had been in that part of Hades occupied by 
the blessed, they hereafter were in heaven. There was 
certainly a change for the better in their state, whether a 
change or not in their place. 



INTRODUCTION. XXXV 

of to-day inherit from their common moth- 
er, the undivided patristic Church. It im- 
plies, also, an entire misunderstanding as to 
the real meaning of the phrase in question, 
and an indifference to the important truth 
which it expresses. 

As to the point in which the Translator 
has so justly and ably criticised the teach- 
ing of the learned Author, it is gratifying 
to observe that Dr. Cremer holds his opin- 
ion as to the possible admittance of souls, 
who have never had the gospel presented 
to them in this life, to an opportunity of 
embracing it during the Intermediate State, 
as " only a conjecture," founded on some 
obscure Scriptural indications. He makes 
it clear in the text that he regards this pos- 
sible post-mortem probation to be of grace, 
not of debt, and to apply not at all to us 
who have the gospel offered to us here and 
now, but only to others to whom such prob- 
lems never come in this life. It is there- 
fore an opinion which can have no practi- 
cal effect, and is a purely sentimental hope 
which we may, he thinks, innocently enter- 
tain in respect to others. 



XXXVI INTRODUCTION. 

We admit that the conditions of salva- 
tion stated in the Scriptures limit us, but 
not God. We have no authority to set 
the limits to what God may do in the 
way of a larger grace, where he has not 
himself positively and plainly set his self- 
decreed limit down in his Word. Never- 
theless our speculations and our senti- 
mental hopes have no valid right beyond 
the express guarantees of his Word. In 
the transcendental region of possible, un- 
covenanted mercies, human thoughts and 
hopes are alike unwarranted and unprofit- 
able. 

But the ground upon which this claim of 
a post-nwrtetn probation for those who have 
never had Christ offered to them in this 
world is now generally pressed by the 
advocates of the new theology, and con- 
demned as heretical by the advocates of 
the old, is that it tacitly implies that, some 
way or other, God, in justice, owes to all 
men an offer of the gospel. If this be so, 
it necessarily follows that the gift of his 
Son to die, instead of being the consum- 
mate act of infinite grace, is a tardy and 



INTRODUCTION. XXXvii 

incomplete act of justice. It is held that 
in the universal judgment men are to be 
tried, not on the basis of the conformity of 
their character or record to the demands 
of the law, but solely by the test of their 
relation to Christ. This, of course, is true 
if men through faith have become the re- 
cipients of an imputed righteousness. But 
if this be not so, they are to be tried and 
judged "according to the deeds done in 
the body." That the heathen to whom 
Christ is not known are morally responsi- 
ble and hence are justly condemned to pun- 
ishment, Paul both asserts and proves in 
Romans. If men be not justly condemned 
as worthy of God's wrath and punishment, 
antecedent to and irrespective of the death 
of Christ and the offer of salvation through 
him, then it necessarily follows that there 
was no necessity for Christ's death, and that 
he did not save men by expiating the guilt 
of their sins. The position that zpost-nior- 
tem probation for the unevangelized is pos- 
sible is unwarranted. The position that 
such a probation is necessary to render God 
just is logically inconsistent with the whole 



XXXV111 INTRODUCTION. 

scheme of Redemption as revealed in the; 
Word. 

Thanking the eminent Author for his 
great services to the Church of Christ, we * 
pray that he may long be spared to con- 
tinue and surpass them. 

A. A. Hodge. 



BEYOND THE GRAVE. 



BEYOND THE GRAVE. 



An ominous obscurity attaches to the 
idea of a world beyond the grave. This 
fascinates us, and to every ray of light that 
illumines, or promises to illumine, that ob- 
scurity we give a hearty welcome. What 
is obscure is not, whether in general there 
be really such a world beyond the grave. 
Many, indeed, persuade themselves that 
there is the difficulty. But the certainty 
of that future world, and the recognition of 
it, is intimately and indissolubly connected 
with the simplest foundations of moral and 
religious life. It is involved in the ac- 
knowledgment of God, and of that law of 
his truth inseparable from him. Such rec- 
ognition is not, indeed, made necessary for 
us, like a result in arithmetic or of chemi- 
cal analysis. In that respect we are free, 
i 



2 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

and may dispose of ourselves. We are free 
to acknowledge or not the eternal law that 
concerns us, and the tribunal, that is, the 
living God, before whom we shall be judged 
according to that law. We acknowledge 
or not at our peril, for we have our fate 
in our hand. Only when the final, valid 
decision concerning us, and how we have 
done our duty, shall be reached, will the 
acknowledgment of the truth be made 
necessary for us. But if we are free to dis- 
pose of ourselves, and are accountable for 
ourselves, then the first proper realization 
and assertion of our freedom should be the 
recognition of this freedom and accounta- 
bility, the recognition of the eternal law 
that concerns us, the recognition of our 
Lord and Judge. If we deny this, then 
nothing is left to us but caprice, and in the 
end it is no matter whether we are free or 
not, or how we live, or what we get by liv- 
ing. Eventually we come under the iron 
law of necessity. 

In this respect the Holy Scripture pro- 
ceeds in a fashion truly sublime. It no- 
where teaches particularly that there is ex- 



DOES DEATH END ALL? 3 

istence beyond the grave, as it nowhere 
says, " There is a God." At most it only 
says, " Fools say there is no God." In the 
Scripture both are taken for granted, and it 
is assumed that only folly, wickedness, or 
pusillanimity could care to deny them. 
The whole law of Sinai, for instance, says 
nothing about future retribution ; yet that 
law would be without significance if every 
word of it were not a rivet in the lock that 
unlocks eternity. 

Accordingly, we find all over the world 
the conviction that there is a " beyond the 
grave," a kingdom of the dead. And the 
more seriously men have scrutinized and 
meditated on the aim and goal of their life, 
the more definite does this conviction ap- 
pear. This is true not only of popular be- 
lief, but also of philosophy. The exception 
is where philosophy turns from investiga- 
tion of eternal law and of the moral char- 
acter of truth, and contents itself with re- 
ducing to a system the enjoyment of life, 
like Greek Epicureanism or Jewish Saddu- 
ceeism ; or where spiritual capacity to ap- 
prehend truth is enfeebled and diminished, 



4 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

and joins hands with aversion for the 
moral and religious foundations of life, as 
we may observe to be actually the case 
among ourselves at the present time. 

It is significant, therefore, that at present 
philosophy is no longer so averse as for- 
merly to this recognition of an existence 
beyond the grave, of a future, not for pos- 
terity only, but for the living. Only a few 
isolated representatives of pantheism and 
some of the medical profession prefer being 
a vanishing wave of the tossing sea of the 
world, to indulging the blessed feeling, that 
even the drop in the ocean may know 
that it is not forgotten. Thus, for exam- 
ple, David Strauss, dedicating his book on 
"The Life of Christ" to his deceased (!) 
brother, writes : " In moments when every 
hope of life was extinguished, thou hast 
never yielded to the temptation to deceive 
thyself by borrowing from the existence 
beyond the grave." Such self-glorification 
and self-sufficiency of man only appears 
like a withered tree to which vanity and 
despair lend the semblance of a sorry living 
figure in the landscape of a desert. It may 



DOES DEATH END ALL? 5 

look like heroism, this renunciation of" bor- 
rowing from future existence ;" but there 
is greater heroism in recognizing existence 
beyond the grave than in denying it. For 
one may not only borrow from it, but the 
situation is found to be rather that there 
one must pay debts that are beyond his 
ability. Recognizing a world hereafter re- 
quires us to go to meet a world that is not 
a continuation of, but in various respects is 
directly the opposite of the present world. 
In distinction from the present world it is 
the complete expression and impression of 
moral laws, of eternal justice. 

Now that so-called scientific materialism 
is on its death-bed, it is left to practical 
materialism to deny a future existence and 
recognize exclusively a present existence. 
With the latter there is no use of further 
contention, since the denial can only be 
persisted in by denying the simplest moral 
truths. For let us not deceive ourselves ; 
the moment we doubt that man must care 
for more than the present, and things this 
side of the grave, that instant we lose every 
lever for giving motion and effectiveness to 



6 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the present life, and our life revolves rest- 
lessly without an aim, in a spiral that death 
cuts short. Is the present time and the hith- 
er world the only reality, and all beside only 
dream and froth, and at best only the ideal 
of an egoistic phantast or of a phantastical 
egoism, then the standard of living is no lon- 
ger immutable right and eternal duty, but 
merely mutable custom. Social life must 
then be founded on egoism, and every lim- 
itation of the " I" will only be for the sake 
of preventing the " I " from self-injury by in- 
evitable collision with a "Thou." Not even 
humanity and human rights may be thought 
of in any true sense. For respect towards 
men and brethren is only a vexatious com- 
pulsion to the man whose sole vocation and 
need is to use and enjoy his life. In such a 
scheme of life there is no place for humil- 
ity, the most blessed of all virtues. Noth- 
ing is of importance but the chief requisites 
of life, health and wealth. The dust of 
past generations is valuable only as it may 
manure beet-fields and promote the sugar 
industry. If mankind were even capable 
of giving up the belief, the spontaneous 



DOES DEATH END ALL? 7 

and firm conviction of a future existence, 
then humanity would speedily degenerate 
into bestiality. 

Such denial of a future existence can 
only be morally understood as the false 
reasoning of a mind that refuses to admit 
that the guilt of having neglected the thirst 
of the soul for truth and eternity is its own 
guilt. No one was ever led to this denial 
against his will, constrained, say, by the 
force of some argument ; but many, against 
their will, constrained by conscience, have 
found themselves compelled to recognize a 
future existence. 

Thus we may firmly maintain that it 
cannot and must not be obscure to us, 
whether there is an existence " beyond the 
grave." If there be a God to whom we are 
held for debt, a law to which we are ac- 
countable, sins of which we are guilty, then 
there is also a judgment that renders a rec- 
ompense for life in the present. Beyond 
this life, over which close the graves, there 
lies a realm of truth and justice — for the 
present world is not that realm. 

Thus already a part of the twilight van- 



8 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ishes in which future existence is usually 
veiled, so long as we neglect to make it a 
matter of earnest meditation. For it is 
surely a great thing to know that there lies 
beyond this life a realm of truth and of in- 
flexible justice, fitted to satisfy the craving 
of our souls for essential truth, when they 
have grown weary of the vain show and 
change of transient things; these souls of 
ours, in which, according to the wonderful- 
ly deep and true saying of Solomon (Eccl. 
iii. n), God has set eternity. 

A DARK PROBLEM WHICH ONLY GOD'S WORD 
CAN SOLVE. 

But this bright side of the future exist- 
ence is turned to gloomy shade for us as 
soon as we remember that it is the nature 
of truth not only to eclipse and triumph 
over what is false and mere show, but also 
to reveal its real character as the opposite 
of the truth. Nothing is left us then but 
the expectation of a judgment that will be 
very little in our favor. For instead of 
seeking the truth and realizing the laws of 
justice, we elude their claims, and seek sat- 



WHAT SAITH SCRIPTURE? 9 

isfaction in show and evanescence. Such 
is, then, the great dilemma presented to us : 
a world of truth, an eternal world, that 
causes a thrill in every fibre of our life, and 
awakes the most ardent longing of man, 
who is made for such a world ; and the 
prospect of being divested, by the influ- 
ences of that world, of every covering of 
our inmost being, and of standing naked 
and bare, without right or power to partake 
of that eternal life. 

We shall make no mistake if we point to 
this discord as the reason why the thought 
of a future existence has, on the one hand, 
the appearance of an obscurity as awful as 
it is ominous, and makes, on the other, the 
impression of a certain insecurity and un- 
certainty. But so much the more are we 
pressed to know what shall become of us. 
What then really awaits mankind beyond 
the grave? Eternal light and life, or — 
what is worse than nonentity — exclusion 
from the world of light, the light that Paul 
designates as the unapproachable dwelling 
of God (i Tim. vi. 16) ? 

Only in the records of redemption will we 



IO BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

find the solution of this problem. There, 
in the Holy Scripture, this discord is clear- 
ly recognized and receives adequate treat- 
ment. Only there does eternal law and its 
claim on us find its expression in inviolable 
clearness and truth. Only there is the 
longing of men as much comprehended in 
love as their sinful being is set in undis- 
guised seriousness and light. There we are 
characterized as the enemies of our own 
aspirations, and this contrast of our sins 
and our aspirations finds its explanation. 
In the archives of redemption, then, we 
find the fullest and truest solution of the 
question, What shall become of us? and 
therewith the confirmation of the saying 
and wish that Plato has handed down to 
us in his celebrated dialogue concerning the 
immortality of the soul. There Simmias 
the Theban, a disciple of Socrates, was un- 
able to follow the philosophizing reasons 
for believing in the immortality of the soul, 
and consequently proposed first to trust to 
his own thorough meditation of the sub- 
ject ; as far as that should not lead to a 
trustworthy judgment, he would trust to 



WHAT SAITH SCRIPTURE? II 

the most reliable human authority, and 
thereby, as in a boat, swim through life as 
well as he could, " unless one may perhaps 
make his pilgrimage more securely and 
without danger in a firmer vessel, that is, 
on a word of God." 

Let us, for this purpose, contemplate the 
word and revelation of our God. 



A CLEAR WORD OF PROPHECY. 

We are not put off with a meagre word 
of information ; for though we have only 
intimations given us, they are unexpect- 
edly rich, clear, and satisfying. The Script- 
ure does not comprehend, in the simple 
contrast of heaven and hell, all that it has 
to say to us concerning existence beyond 
the grave, though ultimately all finds its 
conclusion in this contrast. But before this 
conclusion is accomplished there is still a 
history running on beyond the grave, if we 
may so call it. There is a realm of truth 
and of what passes not away, of light and 
of imperishable life, existing above this 
world. But it will be long before it is ac- 
cessible to those departed out of this world, 
and longer still before it fills the world and 
the world shall be transformed into the 
kingdom of heaven. Existence beyond the 



A CLEAR WORD. 13 

grave is no longer zvhat it was, and it will 
some time no longer be zvhat it now is. In 
treating of existence beyond the grave we 
must speak of a past, present, and future. 

THE FUTURE EASTER MORNING. 

It is the hope of the Church of God on 
earth that the good work begun by our 
Lord himself will eventually receive its 
crowning conclusion in the resurrection of 
the dead. It is an Easter morning for 
whose dawn the Church awaits ; an Easter 
morning as it dawned there in the garden 
of Joseph of Arimathea, on the grave of the 
Prince of Life, the Lion of Judah, who was 
dead and is alive again, and now has the 
keys of hell and death (Rev. i. 18 ; v. 5). 
A morning that shall not again decline to 
evening is to come over the cemetery of 
mankind. It will dawn on the whole cir- 
cuit of the earth, the great grave of all gen- 
erations, and especially on the graves of 
the children of God and brethren of Jesus 
Christ, the first-born brother (Rom. viii. 29 ; 
John xx. 17 ; Heb. ii. 10-12). That will be 
the last Easter kept on earth. Then will 



14 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the last enemy, death, be done away, and 
all will be new. Then no one will any 
more ask, as the disciples once asked of the 
Lord when he foretold his end, "What is 
it to rise from the dead ?" (Mark ix. g, 10.) 
Every one, even the lost, will have an ex- 
perimental idea of this miracle of all mira- 
cles, of which even Plato had some pre- 
sentiment. And thus all mocking shall be 
silenced such as was heard in Athens, Plato's 
city, when Paul preached to them the un- 
known God, and Jesus, whom this God 
raised from the dead. " And when they 
heard of the resurrection of the dead, some 
mocked" (Acts xvii. 32). A second Easter, 
such is the hope of the Church of God — 
not a hope in the sense of the hopes and 
wishes or fancies that we love to exchange 
with one another, but, as the apostle Paul 
says, hope that makes not ashamed ; and if 
we hope for what we do not see, then do 
we with patience wait for it (Rom, v. 5 ; viii. 
25). It is a hope whose ultimate realiza- 
tion to the members of the new covenant 
is not in the least doubtful, because it is 
connected with him whom his Church calls 



THE FUTURE EASTER MORNING. 1 5 

the first-begotten from the dead, the first- 
fruits of them that slept ; and whose work 
would be devoid of its conclusion, and thus 
also of truth, if this hope were not fulfilled. 
This hope is a possession for which be- 
lievers have already received real, indis- 
putable earnest-money; a possession that 
is not only guaranteed to them by the 
words of the divine promise, but by the 
personal experience of the death-conquer- 
ing powers of an indissoluble life. This 
hope is so inseparably bound up with the 
foundation of Christian faith, and with the 
incontestable facts of the inner life, that 
Paul once designates it simply as the task 
of Christian life " to attain to the resurrec- 
tion of the dead " (Phil. iii. 1 1). It forms so 
necessary and inseparable a part of Chris- 
tianity that he calls their error a deadly 
cancer: "who concerning the truth have 
erred, saying that the resurrection is passed 
already" (2 Tim. ii. 18). The persons re- 
ferred to probably denied the future and 
real resurrection of the dead, and interpret- 
ed the whole matter figuratively. Accord- 
ing to the opinion of the apostle, whoever 



1 6 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

doubts the resurrection of the dead must 
doubt the entire Christian truth of salva- 
tion, together with the facts on which it is 
founded ; in a word, the whole of Christian- 
ity. For so he reasons, in that he does not 
conclude, "if Christ be risen, then shall the 
dead rise," but emphasizes the remarkable 
negative contrary: "If the dead are not 
raised, neither hath Christ been raised — 
your faith is vain" (i Cor. xv. 13, 16 sq.). 

REDEMPTION MORE THAN IMMORTALITY. 

Christianity is the religion of redemp- 
tion ; but redemption without abrogation 
of death, without resurrection of the dead, 
were nonsense, a chimera, a nonentity. 
God's work of salvation and redemption, 
that cost the Father his only Son, would 
be merely an attempt to redeem that mis- 
erably miscarried short of its goal, and re- 
vealed not the omnipotence of love, but 
only its eventual impotence. Redemption 
is restoration of life and of everything that 
belongs to life. With a mere immortality 
Christianity cannot be satisfied, any more 
than a man can be satisfied with that notion. 



IMMORTALITY TOO LITTLE. 1 7 

Christianity demands and offers more than 
immortality ; it demands and offers a whole, 
a complete, not a partial redemption. As 
it was said when Israel was led out of 
Egypt, " there shall not a hoof be left be- 
hind " (Exod. x. 26), so it is true in redemp- 
tion, nothing shall be left in the power of 
death. 

This, in fact, is the great difference be- 
tween the Christian hope of the resurrec- 
tion of the dead and what is commonly 
called immortality. The former has to do 
with redeeming and saving; death is, and 
remains, the enemy of life. But where, on 
the other hand, one is content with immor- 
tality, supposing he has found something 
wonderfully beautiful and fitting, his im- 
mortality has to do only with a half pro- 
longation of life, and in the end death even 
becomes the redeemer of mankind. It is 
characterized as a friend, because it frees 
us from the mortal body and the sufferings 
of the present ; as if there were no suffer- 
ings that outlast time, and no burning 
pains besides the distress and misery of 
the body ! To Christianity death is, and 
2 



1 8 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

remains, a misery and an enemy ; though 
Christianity knows very well what dying 
joy is, and makes it, and gives dying con- 
solation to the full. Immortality has noth- 
ing in common with redemption ; and the 
so-called better existence into which death, 
the king of terrors, is supposed to lead us, 
is still for him who expects it only a mis- 
erable makeshift after all, and a beggarly 
compensation for the agreeable things of 
the present life. Christianity does thor- 
oughly earnest work with the reality, and 
does not seek to divest it of its coarseness 
by phrases, and fine words, and visionary 
ideas. It is a religion that will not de- 
ceive, and, above everything, will tolerate 
no self-deception, much less, then, foster it; 
therefore it cannot remove the sting of 
death by anything but a thorough and 
everlasting redemption. It openly declares 
the fact, which men are so ready to hide 
from themselves, that without redemption 
we must remain slaves to the fear of death 
all our lives ; that we cannot at all bear the 
present life and its consequences, viz., death 
and what is connected with it. Not mer- 



IMMORTALITY TOO LITTLE. 1 9 

cilessly, but most mercifully it exposes to a 
race sunk in self-deceit, despair, or insensi- 
bility the whole extent of the injury, in 
order to heal it by virtue of a wondrous 
and blessed redemption. It destroys all 
illusions regarding both the power and the 
weakness of the enemy, because it knows 
the Prince of Life, over whom death hath 
no dominion (Rom. vi. 9), and who is tri- 
umphant. It looks deeper than the great- 
est poet, and hearkens to the sighing of 
the creature, and teaches us to wait and 
watch for the redemption of our body 
(Rom. viii. 19-23). While the superficial 
hope of the soul's immortality, in pointed 
contrast with materialism, really degrades 
the body to a prison of the soul, not even 
the most zealous materialism can ascribe 
greater significance to the body than the 
Holy Scripture does. Immortality of the 
soul w r ould only be a half life, a half con- 
tinuance of life, which, being incorporeal, 
would lack precisely that which, if lacking, 
would make it impossible for us either to 
receive or to possess and retain life. In 
the scriptural view, which agrees also with 



20 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the reality, the body made of dust is neces- 
sary in order to receive and possess life. 
This is true not merely for the children 
born afterwards, but also for the first cre- 
ated man. Without body, no life. Hence 
it is indispensable also there where it con- 
cerns rescuing life from destruction, where 
it concerns redemption. Redemption that 
did not include the body would not be re- 
demption, but, at best, only a scant rescue 
of what is left to be saved. It would never 
give us that fulness of life and bliss of 
which we have at least a presage in the 
full vigor of bodily health, were not our 
corporeal part also included in the redemp- 
tion. Only, as the Bible represents it, the 
body is not everything, as if all would be 
instantly lost when the body returns to 
dust. And all moral self -consciousness, 
both of the philosopher and of the simple 
and unblunted feeling, agrees in this with 
Holy Scripture. Indeed, just for this rea- 
son, there is for the unredeemed man also 
still an existence after death. But in his 
case there is something wanting; his is 
essentially, as yet, no blessed existence. It 



THE DEBT OF NATURE. 21 

is under the continued influence of his be- 
ginning, that is, of death, as the present 
life, even in its beginning, is under the in- 
fluence of its end, that is, of death. Death 
has invaded life like a power — has quite 
subjected it and has become the centre of 
it. It is effective backward and forward, 
so that even birth is no longer merely the 
beginning of life, but also the beginning of 
dying, and thus a new birth is necessary in 
order to be able to begin the eternal life. 

DEATH NOT A DEBT OF NATURE, 

Thus it is clear how little the mere fact 
of the immortality of the soul can satisfy 
Christianity even in respect to human nat- 
ure in general. But, in addition to this, 
there is the serious moral contemplation of 
death, and of its significance for men. To 
Christianity this is something totally dif- 
ferent from a natural consequence of life ; 
much less is it a necessity of nature that 
accomplishes the inevitable separation of 
body and soul. That body and soul are in 
no respect independent of each other is 
just the thing that is made manifest by the 



22 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

fact of death. By his sinful self-determina- 
tion the head of our race essentially severed 
both himself and us from the divine source 
of life. ' Sin is an attempt to live independ- 
ently of God ; an attempt that partly suc- 
ceeded ; whose only partial success, how- 
ever, is both its curse and its bitterest pun- 
ishment, and impels either to unrestrained 
persistence in and repetition of sin, or to 
the profoundest longing for compassionate 
help. Our soul leads a sinful and thus a 
forsaken life ; it is a ruin whose material is 
imperishable, whose structure is rent asun- 
der. Such a life we receive in the way of 
the flesh. Along with its life the body has 
also the severance of life from its divine 
source to transmit and bear, and therewith 
both sin and death. It has become the 
mortal body of the sinful flesh, the body 
of sin and of death. The body, as the 
vehicle and mediator of the life, is the first 
to feel that it is nothing but dust of dust, 
without sustained effusion of the divine 
life. It is the first to feel, and that most 
manifestly, the natural as well as the moral 
consequence, legal and judicial, of this sev- 



THE DEBT OF NATURE. 23 

erance, viz., death. Penetrated by divine, 
eternal breath of life, even the dust of the 
earth would, by the forces of eternity, be 
endowed with incorruption, and transfig- 
uration would have taken the place whose 
gaping void is now filled by corruption. 
Now, however, it has even come about oth- 
erwise ; and, as matters now stand, when 
the sinful self-glorification of men vanished 
with death, as a matter of course, the soul 
also in its turn experiences what dying and 
destruction mean. What body and soul ex- 
perience we may distinguish as death and 
dying. Primarily, what death does to the 
soul is not merely to bear away the gar- 
ment that covers it, the bed in which it 
dreamed of bliss; it does more than that. 
In death the soul is like the poor man who 
has too much to die, too little to live. 
Terrible condition, this suspense and quak- 
ing between life and death, this dying with- 
out end ! As long as death has not opened 
a man's eyes to this situation, he may some- 
how deceive himself, and surrender himself 
to the illusion that his soul lacks nothing. 
We can elude all the impressions and crav- 



24 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ings of our souls as long as we are masters 
of our bodies, and can be busy with the 
labor or diversions of the world that sur- 
rounds us. But with death this possibil- 
ity ends, and the impotence of the soul 
becomes manifest in endless languishing. 
Severed from God by alienation from God, 
it is also alienated from the life that is 
from God. Excluded from the glorious free- 
dom and the unimpeachable independence 
of the divine life, in which man's divine 
sonship and divine image must assert itself, 
eternally powerless, restrained, and bound, 
the immortality of the soul is nothing bet- 
ter than death, an eternal struggle for ex- 
istence, an eternal deprivation of satisfac- 
tion, a self-consumption without end under 
the opposition of a holy God to all ungodly 
and God-estranged being. , 

ETERNAL LIFE. 

Immortality is for sinful, unredeemed man 
nothing else than eternal death ; no ray of 
light illumines the night, but only shadow 
from the light. Without redemption im- 
mortality is least of all a consolation for us. 



ETERNAL LIFE. 2$ 

Annihilation were better. It is significant 
that the Scripture hardly ever speaks of 
immortality. Only once does it apply the 
word in respect to men, where Paul says of 
the resurrection of the body, " This mor- 
tal must put on immortality " (i Cor. xv. 
53, 54); and once again where it speaks of 
God the only Blessed One and Potentate, 
"who alone hath immortality " (i Tim. vi. 
16). The Scripture never speaks of the 
immortality of the soul. For, on the one 
hand, immortality is a much too lofty no- 
tion, and signifies an entire freedom from 
death, which appertains in no way to man, 
sinful both in body and soul. On the oth- 
er hand, according to the common way 
of speaking, immortality is something too 
empty and meaningless, and signifies only 
that the soul does not, with the last breath 
of the weary breast, become the sport of 
the winds to be scattered abroad, does not 
become dust with the body as if left with 
it — all which profits us little. 

We need something very different from 
such meaningless immortality that has noth- 
ing about it like the better condition that 



26 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

men dream of. For, to mention the mat- 
ter once more, if any one should believe 
(and it is the belief of many) that death is 
at least a benefit for many, so far as it frees 
them from the pains and sufferings of the 
body, from the afflictions and disappoint- 
ments of the earth, let him reflect whether 
many would not, in the end, long to have 
back again the pains of the body that were 
once so intolerable, if only they might thus 
redeem themselves from the distress that 
deluges their souls, of which on earth they 
were unmindful. Before death can be a 
benefit to the sufferer, a life must be born 
in him that death cannot harm. The pow- 
ers of the redemption must have become 
operative in him. Then, and not before, 
does the apostle's consolation apply, that 
the sufferings of this present time are not 
worthy to be compared with the glory 
which shall be revealed to usward (Rom. 
viii. 1 8), that is, when that other saying is 
true: " Though our outward man is decay- 
ing, yet our inward man is renewed day by 
day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). 

We have need, we said, of something very 



ETERNAL LIFE. 2 J 

different from such indefinite, meaningless, 
and yet again, alas, only too significant 
immortality. For every serious man, to 
whom God, righteousness, and judgment 
are still realities, and to whom, because of 
these realities, there are such things as an 
eternity and a future, there is a question 
that is much more definite and full of mean- 
ing, Is there an everlasting life? Is there 
a redemption from the death under which 
the entire man suffers? Along with man- 
kind in general we have, indeed, become 
accustomed, if not to death exactly, still to 
the thought that body and soul must one 
time separate. And in the question con- 
cerning everlasting life we think primarily 
only about the salvation of our souls, of 
their bliss, unmindful of that which returns 
to dust. And yet, as we may learn from 
the bitterness that the death of the body 
occasions the soul, this separation is some- 
thing unnatural, and we can sympathize 
with the apostle when he says, how much 
better it is not to be unclothed but clothed 
upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed 
up of life (2 Cor. v. 4). If the thought of a 



2 8 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

resurrection from death is not of itself in 
our minds when inquiring after eternal life, 
still we crave with everlasting life a repara- 
tion for the suffering of death, an abroga- 
tion of all that death brings with it, a re- 
demption from the bondage of death. And 
whoever seriously craves redemption will 
see a proof of how truly the religion of re- 
demption divinely revealed compasses and 
satisfies the needs of mankind precisely in 
this, viz., that redemption reaches as far as 
sin and death ; that is, the redemption of 
our bodies is included in the divine work 
of salvation and deliverance. In a word, 
there is a resurrection from death, a resur- 
rection of the dead, a full and entire abro- 
gation of death. For ultimately this is 
what is involved and meant, when in the 
body of this death we raise the question : 
Is there eternal life? And only when re- 
demption includes also a resurrection from 
the dead, is it what it proposes to be and 
must be, a conquering of death. The say- 
ing of the apostle, " Death is swallowed 
up in victory. O death, where is thy 
sting? Hell, where is thy victory ?" (i Cor. 



HADES. 29 

xv. 54, 55), is only fulfilled when the re- 
demption of our bodies has come about, 
and the dead have risen. 

WHY WAS MENTION OF A RESURRECTION SO 
LONG DELAYED IN SCRIPTURE? 

It is true that there was a promise of 
redemption given long before there was 
ever expressed the thought of a resurrection 
of the dead which that promise involved. 
But the promise did not open up a view 
into a " better existence beyond the grave/' 
but into a still remote blessed period. 
What the promise taught men to hope for 
lay not immediately beyond the grave, by 
a great deal. 

How was it beyond the grave when the 
promise of redemption was not yet fulfilled? 

HADES. 

Until the redemption was accomplished, 
we find in the Scripture one place for all 
dead, the realm of death. In the New Tes- 
tament it is called by the same name by 
which the Greeks named the place of the 
dead — Hades; in the Old Testament it is 



30 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

called Sheol. In our Lutheran [and also the 
English] translation both are rendered by 
the word Hell, and not altogether improp- 
erly; for Hades does not belong to heaven, 
but in a contrastive way, like heaven, forms 
a contrast to earth, and at the end of the 
ages finds its place in hell (Rev. xx. 14). 
Hades, Sheol, the realm of death, is found 
in immediate attendance on death ; its loca- 
tion there is the natural, immediate con- 
sequence of death. Because of this relation 
between death and Hades it is said, e.g., 
in the visions of the Revelation of John, 
" I saw, and behold, a pale horse ; and he 
that sat upon him, his name was Death ; 
and Hades followed with him " (Rev. vi. 8). 
In the realm of the dead, primarily and 
foremost by way of beginning, it becomes 
manifest what death is, viz., not merely the 
departure from earthly life, the separation 
of man from the world that surrounds him, 
and of the soul from the body, but separa- 
tion and removal from God, the source of 
life, from God whose place of making reve- 
lation is the earth, and not Hades, whose 
abode is heaven and not Hades. Thus one 



HADES. 31 

can understand Hezekiah's lament : " Now 
in the repose of my days I shall go to the 
gates of Sheol. No more shall I behold the 
Lord, the Lord in the land of the living 
(Isa. xxxviii. 10, 1 1) ; and also the lament 
of the Psalmist : " The dead praise not the 
Lord, neither any that go down into si- 
lence" (Ps. cxv. 17). The Sons of Korah 
lament, " Free \i. e. y forsaken] among the 
dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, 
whom thou rememberest no more : and they 
are cut off from thy hand " (Ps. lxxxviii. 5). 
So gloomy is the prospect in the kingdom 
of the dead that Hezekiah, when his prayer 
to be saved from death was heard, said, 
" Sheol cannot praise thee, death cannot 
celebrate thee : they that go down into the 
pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, 
the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this 
day" (Isa. xxxviii. 18, 19). Job has the 
impression of a condition eternally lost 
when viewing Hades, "As a cloud is con- 
sumed and vanisheth away; so he that 
goeth down into Sheol shall come up no 
more" (Job vii. 9). Hades, as the sequence 
of death, points inflexibly also to the final 



32 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

consequence of it (death — Hades — second 
death, Rev. xx.), and thus to those whom 
it receives it offers nothing for which they 
can render thanks, as is said, Ps. vi. 5, " In 
Sheol who shall give thee thanks ?" For 
all this, however, be it said in anticipation, 
there may be some there who have reason 
for thankfulness spite of Hades, as will be- 
come plainer further on. In Hades all that 
makes death terrible for men is concen- 
trated, and, as a matter of course, torment 
is included, as appears in the parable of the 
rich man and Lazarus. The tumult of life 
is at an end, the light of this world extin- 
guished, and the light of heaven does not 
penetrate thither. It is " a land of dark- 
ness and the shadow of death " (Job xx. 
20-22), a land of stillness, where each has 
enough to do in contemplating his own 
suffering. No one is able to offer another 
consolation or a word of comfort which he 
needs himself. They are together who in 
life lived together ; they see one another ; 
they know one another and greet one an- 
other, but cannot help one another and 
share the suffering ; and that is no blessed 



HADES. 33 

reunion {Wiederseheri). Each has his place 
along with kindred spirits, but they no 
longer live with one another. What they 
were, that they are. In Hades the whole 
world -history comes together. It is the 
re7idezvons of history come to a stand -still 
in the midst of its movement — family his- 
tory, national history, world history, and 
each new arrival completes the missing 
members. It is the securest chamber of 
archives ; only here below, and from the 
side of present existence, those archives 
are not legible. Sublime and more than 
merely poetic is the description that we 
read in Ezek. xxxii. One may say, Hades 
is the cemetery of souls ; it is even the contin- 
uation of death, and in a way that is inevi- 
table shows to souls, on which death has 
stamped its traits, what death really is. 
Hades is like the waterless pit that offered 
Joseph no refreshment (Zech. ix. 1 1 ; Heb. 
xiii. 20), and is thus the prison of souls. 
But the end of souls is not there, for it is 
a prison that at last will open its doors for 
the final step of its tenants. Hades is a 
vestibide. There is no doubt about it that 
3 



34 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

one is better off on earth than in Hades ; 
for at least the life on earth is not in its 
own nature a first step to death and Hades, 
though it may become and has become so. 
It bears even yet the marks of being a 
blessed gift of God, which w r as its original 
character, and even in its condition of bond- 
age it has in it the prophecy of the glorious 
freedom of the children of God. 

As the Old Testament represents things, 
we observe that for the believing and right- 
eous of that time this realm of the dead is also 
the place to which they look as the goal of 
their pilgrimage. Nowhere do we find a 
trace of joyful anticipation of death, or of 
a longing for death, such as we see in Sim- 
eon and Paul. The only saying that has 
that appearance was uttered by Elijah : " It 
is enough ; now, O Lord, take away my 
life " (i Kings xix. 4). But that is a wail 
of despair, which expresses, indeed, a hope, 
but a hope that is very, very far from such 
hope as Paul expresses when he says, " I 
have a desire to depart and be with Christ " 
(Phil. i. 23). In Elijah's words it is the 
hope of one who despairs of the world, of 



HADES. 35 

his people, and of his work, and who has 
only one refuge left, Le^ the Lord that 
called him into his service and for his work. 
It is a hope that looks away and beyond 
Hades, of which we shall hear further ex- 
pression in the confessions of others. 

But, notwithstanding that hope, the fact 
remains that Hades receives all the dead, 
however different in character the people 
may be. Jacob laments: "I will go down 
into Sheol unto my son mourning " (Gen. 
xxxvii. 5). David enjoins on Solomon his 
son to bring Joab and Shimei down to 
Sheol with blood, and not let them come 
down with peace, because they had been 
the adversaries of him, the anointed of the 
Lord (i Kings ii. 6, 9). Samuel, the serv- 
ant of the Lord, says to Saul, " To-morrow 
shalt thou and thy sons be with me " (1 Sam. 
xxxviii. 19). He had said to him before, 
" Because thou hast rejected the word of 
the Lord, therefore the Lord hath rejected 
thee ;" thus it was the servant of the Lord 
speaking to the rejected of the Lord, there 
by the witch of Endor, that said this. The 
Psalmist laments: "What man is he that 



36 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

liveth and shall not see death? shall he 
[that can] deliver his soul from the hand 
of Shed?" (Psalm lxxxix. 48). Hence the 
dismay felt even by the pious of the Old 
Testament in view of the condition after 
death. They shuddered at the prospect 
of entering the realm of the dead, Hades. 
And it is chiefly they whom the author of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews has in mind 
when he says (Heb. ii. 15) that Christ by 
his death should redeem those who through 
fear of death were all their lifetime subject 
to bondage. And in this connection we 
would remark now that, according to this 
passage, it was not till Christ died that re- 
demption came to them. 

HADES THE PORCH OF HEAVEN FOR OLD TESTA- 
MENT SAINTS. 

It is manifest that Hades was no fitting 
place for the pious of the Old Testament. 
How then are we to explain the presence 
of believers and unbelievers in one com- 
mon place, without distinction of locality ? 
We find the explanation precisely in the 
fact that Hades is only a vestibule, a tern- 



A PORCH OF HEAVEN. 37 

porary place of sojourn, and that in espe- 
cial it was such for the righteous of the 
Old Testament, As in Hades God's wrath 
is manifested, as the Lord himself says, 
" Mine anger burns in Sheol where it is 
deepest (Deut. xxxii. 22) ; it is, then, the 
proper place for the godless, as, e.g., for 
Korah and his company, for such as will 
not let themselves be attracted by the holy 
wisdom of God, etc. This is distinctly rec- 
ognized in many places of the Old Testa- 
ment. And it is just in connection with 
the thought of it that, along with the pros- 
pect of Hades and above it, there shines 
for the righteous the dawn of another day, 
of a day when they shall be led forth from 
Hades. Thus the children of Korah con- 
sole themselves in the forty-ninth Psalm. 
There will come a morning when the pious 
shall triumph over their adversaries. The 
latter, who deported themselves on earth 
as if they alone had a title to the everlast- 
ing possession of the world, will then be 
homeless. " But God will redeem my soul 
from the power of Sheol" (Psalm xlix. 15). 
In this connection belongs the conviction 



38 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

expressed in the Proverbs of Solomon : 
" The way of life is upward for the wise, 
that he may depart from Sheol beneath' 7 
(Prov. xv. 24; comp. xiis. 14). These are 
glimpses of light, recognitions of the truth 
apprehended by faith in times of the fear 
of death. They are glimpses that have a 
direct moulding influence on the expression 
of the promise of salvation, as, e.g., when 
Zechariah (ix. 11) says, "By the blood of 
the covenant will I send forth thy prison- 
ers [i. e.j the imprisoned Israelites] out of 
the pit wherein is no water/' 

Corresponding to this there must be an 
essential difference between the condition 
of the believing and righteous in the realm 
of the dead and the condition of the rest 
there. Even the pious also must feel what 
a man loses by death. But in place of 
self -consuming recollections of their loss, 
in place of the tormenting consciousness 
that they have reached the beginning of the 
end, came the hope of a future redemption, 
firmly believed while they were still on 
earth — the hope in the Lord who had 
promised, " O death, I will be thy plagues ; 



A PORCH OF HEAVEN. 39 

Sheol I will be thy destruction " (Hos. xiii. 
14). With that there was set a limit to the 
power of Hades to penetrate the souls of 
believers with its terrors. Not, indeed, that 
Hades offered them any sort of consolation ; 
yet they were not deprived of it. In this 
connection belong the intimations that there 
are degrees in Hades, according to which 
the reprobate are found in its deepest abyss, 
where its terrors are most concentrated and 
its torments burn the hottest, while on its 
borders are found those who have only to 
wait until a Mighty One appears, before 
whom the bolts of Hades shall burst and 
its gates fly open. 

Thus, along with the sad prospect of the 
realm of death, there can be uttered con- 
sistently the words that testify to a quiet 
consolation: " Merciful men are taken away, 
none considering that the righteous is taken 
from that which is evil. He shall enter into 
peace: they shall rest in their beds, each 
one walking in his uprightness " (Isa. lvii. 
1, 2). David can say, " My flesh also shall 
rest in hope ;" and Jacob can say, " I have 
waited for thy salvation, O Lord." While 



40 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the rich man in Hades suffers torments, 
Lazarus at the same time, spite of Hades, 
rests in Abraham's bosom. And these in- 
effaceable distinctions contain the result of 
the precedent life. But in the Old Testa- 
ment the conviction that Hades does not 
eternally end all, more and more gets the 
supremacy ; and beyond the prospect of the 
realm of death and of the dead, the pious 
are able to apprehend the expectation of a 
future resurrection of the dead. 

WHY A HADES FOR ALL THE DEAD BEFORE 
CHRIST ? 

After all that we have now considered, 
we may propose the inquiry: " How does 
it happen that, instead of an eternal deci- 
sion, instead of a complete separation of 
men after death, and keeping them separate, 
instead of a final recompense, the Old Tes- 
tament shows us a universal realm of the 
dead ? Such a situation is not the valid so- 
lution of the moral contrasts of life that we 
look for in a life beyond death. 

The reason for this is, that, according to 
the gracious decree of God, such a legal and 



WHY HADES FOR ALL? 4 1 

valid solution cannot come about other- 
wise than in connection with a redemption. 
Without that, a judicial decision affecting 
the life of men would, spite of differences 
in particulars, be adverse and ruinous to 
every one; for the moral foundation, the 
sinful heart, must there, where the cover- 
ings of this life are stripped off, appear un- 
veiled, and the only difference that would 
remain would be this, that those who in life 
were penitent would acquiesce in the judg- 
ment submissive to suffering, while others 
would resentfully, yet helplessly, strive to 
ward it off. The Old Testament view of 
one realm of the dead for all is a sublime 
testimony to the universal sinfulness of the 
human race. 

Until, therefore, there should come about 
a rightful redemption by means of a valid 
sacrifice, death, the wages of sin, reigned, 
and with it Hades, the continuation of 
death, even over those who looked for re- 
demption. And now we can understand 
Simeon's joyous anticipation of death at the 
incoming of the new covenant : "- Lord now 
thou lettest thy servant depart in peace, for 



42 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

mine eyes have seen thy salvation." And 
we can understand how, in the Psalms, 
those witnesses of the inner life of the 
pious in Old Testament times, there should 
be such full and various expression of the 
bitter sorrow of death. This difference be- 
tzveen the Old Testament and the New Tes- 
tament prospect of existence beyond the grave 
is not to be referred to an imperfect knowl- 
edge of the former concerning life after 
death, but to the difference between the pe- 
riods. It is a historical difference. 

A CHANGE BEYOND THE GRAVE WHEN CHRIST 
CAME. 

It was actually different with existence 
beyond the grave in Old Testament times 
from what it is now. If it were true, as 
many erroneously affirm, that the Israelites 
were unfamiliar with the thought of eternal 
life, it would still be a most surprising thing 
did they furnish no representations of the 
state and life after death, or only very de- 
fective ones, when all heathen nations, and 
especially the civilized nations of antiquity, 
had such richly developed representations 



A GREAT CHANGE, 43 

about the future and the condition after 
death. Would Israel alone have been able 
to forego such attempts ? Oh no ; the mat- 
ter has quite another explanation. Faith 
in the living God and his inviolable law 
raised an inexorable barrier to all dreams 
of the heathen world regarding the state 
after death, and especially to all their 
imaginary hopes of good. There only re- 
mained the certainty of divine judgment. 
Even the heathen world could not get rid 
of this, but carried it about in its conscience 
as a consciousness of guilt and judgment ; 
with which, of course, their aristocratic 
philosophy made no attempt to settle ac- 
counts. All hopes of the future, however, 
were, for Old Testament saints, attached to 
the promise of a Messiah and the expecta- 
tion of redemption founded on that. Be- 
fore that appeared, they could hope noth- 
ing even for existence beyond the grave. 
The living and the dying must hope for 
the salvation of God (Gen. xlix. 18.) Mem- 
bers of the people of God felt the need of 
everlasting life as much and even more 
than the heathen, and they cherished the 



44 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

hope of everlasting life not less than the 
heathen. Only they could not expect it as 
something to be after death ; for only the 
Messiah could bring it (2 Tim. u 10 ; Heb. 
ii. 15). They must wait for him, and for 
the new period then to dawn, 

WHY OLD TESTAMENT SAINTS SAID SO LITTLE 
OF BLISS BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

It cannot, therefore, surprise us that so 
little is said in the Old Testament about 
bliss beyond the grave. And we have no 
need to explain this silence by assuming 
that it was first through Babylonian and 
Persian influences that Israel learned to 
seek Paradise beyond the grave, and hope 
for a resurrection of the dead. Those in- 
fluences are totally inadequate to help us 
comprehend how and in what sense a peo- 
ple that knew the living God, and had his 
law and his promise, could propound the 
question that was put to our Lord, " What 
must I do to inherit eternal life?" Where- 
as, on the other hand, that question is easi- 
ly accounted for in view of the Old Testa- 
ment prospects. But that the Messianic 



THE ANCIENT HOPE. 45 

hopes produced no richer development of 
the hopes of the future should occasion no 
wonder. For redemption is something so 
amazing for the world, to which calamity 
and death are become the law of life, that 
it involved exceeding much in order to 
preserve this hope through centuries and 
millenniums. 

The more the custodians of this hope 
had lost themselves in its details, the hard- 
er it would have been to save and preserve 
it through the contradictions of things seen. 
The task of taking note of the successive 
particulars in the realization of their hope 
was more than they had time for. There 
are, notwithstanding, traces of a hope of a 
resurrection of the dead, though it is not 
well defined or clearly expressed. That 
there was such a hope does not seem 
strange in those who so bitterly deplored 
death, both in its cause and in its conse- 
quences, and in whom the hope offered de- 
fiance to death and all connected with it. 
Hence it is not surprising that the epistle 
to the Hebrews (xi. 19) ascribes even to 
Abraham the belief in the possibility of a 



46 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

resurrection of the dead. The first form 
of this hope that in the Old Testament 
reaches out beyond death, is the expecta- 
tion of deliverance from death and from the 
power of death, by which the ungodly and 
sinners will be permanently held captive. 
Especially in the Psalms do we find its ex- 
pression, and in the confession of Job, " I 
know that my Redeemer lived!." With 
the figure of Israel's death is conjoined the 
deeply impressive and sublime represen- 
tation of a promised resurrection (Ezek. 
xxxvii ; Isa. xxvi. 19 sqq. ; Hos. vi. 1 sqq.). 
Such a pictorial representation would not 
have been possible if the thought of a res- 
urrection had not already originated in 
some quarter. And so, again, perhaps by 
occasion of this image, the hope of con- 
quering death (Isa. xxv. 8) grew to be a dis- 
tinct hope of the resurrection of the dead 
(comp. Hos. xiii. 14). Thus the prophecy 
of Daniel (xii. 2) fell on ground ready pre- 
pared : "Many of them that sleep in the 
dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever- 
lasting life, and some to shame and ever- 
lasting contempt." This is the first and 



THE ANCIENT HOPE. 47 

only clear and definite word of promise in 
the Old Testament of the resurrection. 
But when at length, by the discipline of 
prophecy, divine judgments, and merciful 
deliverances, the hope of the coming sal- 
vation became a possession never more to 
be lost, and constituted a part of the very 
existence of the people of Israel, then the 
hope of redemption took the form of hope 
of resurrection. It finds various expression 
in the Apocrypha (Tob. ii. 17 ; Mace. vii. 9) ; 
and when Christ appeared, we find it spread 
among the entire nation. The Saducees, 
who were representatives of pleasure-lov- 
ing, egoistic, self-seeking unbelief, denied it. 
Jesus proved it by the simple fact that, 
after the Patriarchs were dead, when God 
was giving the fundamental revelation to 
Moses (Exod. iii. 6 sqq.), he called himself 
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and 
the God of Jacob, and yet is God of the 
living and not of the dead, who would also 
fulfil to the Patriarchs the promise that he 
had given to them. He points to it as a 
fact that cannot possibly escape a believing 
and penetrating consideration, inasmuch as 



48 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

where God enters into communion with 
men, which of course aims at eternity, there 
the intention is to conquer death and re- 
deem to life. 

EXPECTATION OF CHRIST BECAME EXPECTATION 
OF RESURRECTION. 

Thus the significant fact will not be in- 
comprehensible, that in Jesus, and his con- 
temporaries and his disciples, we find the 
hope of resurrection, not as a constituent 
part merely, but as the proper form and ex- 
pression of the Messianic hope. The hope 
of a Messiah is the hope of resurrection. 
When Paul was called to answer before the 
chief council in Jerusalem, he took advan- 
tage of the circumstance that a part were 
Saducees, representatives of unbelief, and 
part were Pharisees, who at least believed 
firmly in the authority of God's word, and 
" he cried out in the council, Men and breth- 
ren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee ; 
of the hope and resurrection of the dead I 
am called in question " (Acts xxiii. 6). Thus 
to Paul, also, Israel's hope of the fulfilment 
of the old divine promises was at the same 



THE RESURRECTION. 49 

time and essentially a hope of resurrection. 
Before Felix he confessed, " that after the 
way which they call a sect, so worship I 
the God of my fathers, believing all things 
which are written in the law and in the 
prophets, and have hope toward God, which 
thejr themselves also look for, that there 
shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of 
the just and unjust" (Acts xxiv. 14, 15). 
Before Agrippa he says, " And now I stand 
here and am judged for the hope of the 
promise made of God unto our fathers; 
unto which promise our twelve tribes, ear- 
nestly serving God night and day, hope to 
come. For which hope's sake I am accused 
of the Jews. Why should it be thought a 
thing incredible with you, that God should 
raise the dead ?" (Acts xxvi. 6-8). Paul ex- 
plains the connection between the hope of 
resurrection and the faith in Jesus as the 
Messiah to this effect, that according to the 
word of prophecy the Messiah must suffer 
and be the first of the resurrection of the 
dead, in order to proclaim the light of life 
to the people and to the Gentiles " (Acts 
xxvi. 22, 23). According to this the Athe- 

4 



50 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

nians were not mistaken in supposing they 
heard of the resurrection of the dead in 
general, when Paul spoke of the man whom 
God raised from the dead, and by whom he 
will judge the whole circuit of the earth in 
righteousness (Acts xvii. 31 sqq.). So, too, 
the Saducees were quite correct in under- 
standing that the proclamation of the risen 
Messiah involved the resurrection of the 
dead (Acts iv. 2). Only, in the case of the 
Athenians, this connection was detected by 
their natural and correct feeling, whereas 
the Saducees, in their conscious opposition 
to the old truth of salvation, were clearly 
aware of this mutual coherence. 

Messiah and resurrection of the dead are 
two things indissolubly connected. But 
this only confirms what we have already 
found to be true, viz., that before the ful- 
filment of the promise the outlook into the 
state after death could only be obscure and 
sad. On the other side of the grave, also, 
the period of waiting extended to the day 
of the fulfilment, itself presenting nothing 
but the feeling a?td experience of death; in 
which state of waiting also the pious had 



THE RESURRECTION. 5 I 

nothing in which they might rejoice be- 
side what they took there with them, viz., 
the hope of the redemption. When the 
period of redemption was come, then also 
the outlook into the state beyond the grave 
became, as it must, another thing from what 
it zvas; for the condition after death became 
different. 



II. 



PARADISE OPENED. 



This great change, and the moment of 
its inauguration, is characterized by a say- 
ing of Jesus Christ, that has an unfamiliar 
sound to an Old Testament ear, viz., that 
hitherto unheard promise that he made to 
the thief on the cross, " To-day shalt thou 
be with me in Paradise." This is something 
wholly new. Paradise is above in heaven, 
whither Paul was transported. But heaven 
had never hitherto opened up for men, 
those two witnesses of God excepted, Enoch 
and Elijah, who never saw death at all, and 
consequently never saw the continuation of 
death, the realm of death. Nowhere in the 
Old Testament does heaven appear as the 
place of bliss, as the location of the eternal, 
unchangeable, and unfading inheritance, of 
the spiritual and eternal blessings in heav- 
enly things, as it does in the New Testa- 



PARADISE OPENED. 53 

ment. It is ever and only referred to as an 
unapproachable place where the unveiled 
glory of God is revealed. Christ does not 
take away some veil that had till then in- 
tercepted the view into the existence be- 
yond the grave. He has removed an ob- 
stacle, he has taken away a wall of separa- 
tion that till then hindered men from en- 
tering into a life of bliss. 

Christ himself had to enter into the king- 
dom of death after having shared with us life 
and death. But instantly it would needs be 
manifest that death had no rights over him 
and could not hold him. He went through 
the realm of death, and appeared before the 
presence of God with the sacrifice he offered 
for us, as one who had died, not for himself 
and on his own account, but in fellowship 
with us and on our behalf. Thereupon 
Paradise, with all the hitherto lost glory of 
Paradise, opened up first of all for those 
who had till this time waited for this sacri- 
fice in penitent and steadfast faith 3 and as the 
last among them, for that thief. For when 
death could no longer hold Christ, it could 
also no longer hold those for whom his all- 



54 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

sufficient sacrifice availed. After he had ap- 
peared before the presence of God for us, 
and the sanctuary was opened up, the gates 
of Hades could no longer detain his believ- 
ing ones. A change took place on the other 
side of the grave. Heaven opened up, and 
only those remained behind in the realm of 
death who on earth walked not the way of 
life. Matthew informs us of a sign of this 
wonderful change in the kingdom of the 
dead. When Jesus died, the veil of the 
temple was rent in two from the top to 
the bottom, in token that the way into the 
heavenly original of the sanctuary was now 
open forever — " and the earth did quake', 
and the rocks rent, and the graves were 
opened " (Matt, xxvii. 51-53). 

The reign of death was broken, the rela- 
tions beyond the grave were become differ- 
ent from what they were ; and now the 
effect of this became manifest also on this 
side of the grave. So far was it from true 
that Christ should continue under the pow- 
er and dominion of the xealm of death, that, 
on the contrary, having entered into death, 
it was impossible that he could be holden 



Christ's resurrection. 55 

of it (Acts ii. 24). That the redemption 
was accomplished, that death, the legal con- 
sequence of sin, had lost its power, was 
manifest first in himself by his resurrection. 
That set him forth as the first-fruits of them 
that slept, and as first-born brother of the 
redeemed. 

what Christ's resurrection means. 
The resurrection is the complete abroga- 
tion of death and of all that clusters around 
it, all connected with it, all its consequences. 
It is the entire and complete release of man 
from all the injury that befell him through 
death. The resurrection is the return into 
life, a return conditioned on this abrogation 
of death. And the return is into a free 
life, — a life which, forever freed from the 
condemnation of sin, is endowed with the 
powers of eternity. Such is the result of 
the redemption. And as Christ represent- 
atively took our judgment on himself, suf- 
fering and dying as if he were one of us, so 
first on him, because he was the Redeemer, 
was manifest what it means to be saved ; 
he was the first-fruits of them that sleep. 



56 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

What is true of him is true of the whole 
race of his brethren, with whom he has in- 
dissolubly united himself. Either he dies, 
and with him humanity goes to ruin, whose 
stability is involved in him and his fate, or 
he triumphs ; then he triumphs for his race 
and his race with him, unless even yet some 
will have nothing to do with him. If he 
returns to his brethren, if death cannot hold 
him, then it cannot have dominion over 
him, and the abolition of death is at hand, 
the resurrection of the dead, the transfigu- 
ration of the living. 

We have accustomed ourselves to keep 
the hope of the resurrection quite in the 
background of Christian thinking. In our 
thoughts we would be all right, forsooth, 
even without it, if only a purely spiritual life 
were promised us ; and we do not consider 
that w T ith such spiritualizing of all cravings 
(the apostle would call it a false spiritual- 
ity) the reality of their gratification is more 
and more dissipated. We must learn to 
feel and think in a more realistic fashion, 
and not build up for ourselves a system of 
eternity out of the facts and dissonances of 



CHRIST S RESURRECTION. 57 

the present. The resurrection of the dead 
is not an article of the creed meant only 
to round off the whole system of Christian 
truth. It is rather the goal and the climax 
of the divine work of redemption, its most 
necessary and glorious development, the 
ripe fruit of the tree of life, that does not, 
as that fig-tree, put forth leaves instead of 
fruit. In the resurrection of the dead it 
becomes manifest for the first time what 
it really means to be redeemed, and that is 
its essential significance. 

Therefore Christ regards the raising of 
the dead as his essential work as Saviour. 
He says it not only once, he repeats it three 
times in that wonderfully "hard saying" 
recorded in John vi., in which he sets forth 
the programme of his calling as Saviour: 
" This is the Father's will which hath sent 
me, that of all that which he hath given me 
I should lose nothing, but should raise it up 
again at the last day. And this is the will 
of him that sent me, that every one which 
seeth the Son and believeth on him may 
have everlasting life ; and I will raise him 
up at the last day. No man can come to 



58 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

me, except the Father which hath sent me 
draw him ; and I will raise him up at the 
last day" (John vi. 39, 40, 44). For this 
reason he calls himself the resurrection and 
the life. Death must yield unconditionally 
before him when he displays his power; 
and as the other miracles that he did were 
signs and prophecies of his power to make 
all things new, so the conclusive sign of his 
being Saviour is given in the concluding 
words of his answer to the inquiring Bap- 
tist, " The dead are raised up and the poor 
have the gospel preached to them" (Matt, 
xi. 5). 

Thus, then, the resurrection of the dead 
is an essential and proper part of the divine 
work of salvation and redemption that was 
to be performed on us ; and, in fact, so es- 
sential is it, that, as already quoted, Paul 
draws the conclusion that at first sight is 
so surprising: " If there be no resurrection 
of the dead, then is not Christ risen " — a 
conclusion that in turn forms the premise 
for the next : " And if Christ be not raised 
your faith is vain ; *ye are yet in your sins. 
Then they also which are fallen asleep in 



Christ's resurrection. 59 

Christ are perished " (1 Cor. xv. 12, 16-18). 
This conclusion is surprising, because he 
makes the acknowledgment of a fact of the 
past depend on a fact of the future about 
which there is debate ; and because there- 
with he summons the assurance of our faith 
and state of salvation to testify to the past 
and future. In order to understand the 
decisive significance here attached by the 
apostle to the resurrection of the dead, we 
must represent to ourselves the significance 
that belongs to the resurrection of Christ. 
Both facts are so important to Christianity 
that they not merely stand or fall together, 
but with them is involved the question 
whether the faith, in which some live and 
others have died, is a self-delusion, a be- 
trayal of mankind, or not. If there is no 
resurrection of the dead, then it is in vain 
and superfluous to believe, and " only he 
that lives is right," as the Sadduceeism of 
old and of modern times maintains. This 
is now the significance of the resurrection 
of Christ, that Jesus has actually accom- 
plished the work for which he died on the 
cross, according to the word of Paul, "Jesus 



60 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

was delivered for our offences, and was raised 
again for our justification " (Rom. iv. 25). 
If Christ did not rise, then he died in vain 
and there is no redemption. It is perfectly- 
correct, then, to say, if the dead rise not, 
then Christ has died in vain. From this it 
appears that the resurrection hope is insep- 
arably connected with the fundamental facts 
and principles of Christian faith. 

Let us look, however, a little closer at 
the meaning of the resurrection of Christ 
in order to perceive what it means for our 
faith, and at the same time for the fulfil- 
ment of our hope. As he hung upon the 
cursed tree, and suffered what did not be- 
long to him, viz., the wage and curse of our 
sin, in him was found the representative and 
mediator for us, and our redemption was 
accomplished. He placed himself in our 
ranks and became like one of us in order 
to share all with us, life and death, and to 
help us by his sacrifice. Because he was 
our blood and flesh, he experienced in him- 
self what we have to bear and suffer, al- 
though in him the inward postulate, L e., 
fellowship in sin, was wanting. He needed 



Christ's resurrection. 6i 

not to die, and yet he died. Else had the 
judgment then fallen on the World. But 
now his death has taken the place of the 
judgment, and the world is reconciled. It 
owes its stability to the death of Christ, 
and likewise all its future prospect to him, 
henceforth its head and Lord. He has not 
through death taken his departure from it, 
his soul being safe with the Father. Were 
that the case, then would all and every hope 
of the future have vanished ; he would be 
the only one delivered ; all the rest of us 
would be lost, for no one has his hope. 
No ; he did not die in vain. Death cannot 
hold him ; the Father gives him back to us, 
for he has reconciled us for the sake of his 
death. He belongs to us since he took on 
him flesh and blood, and now belongs eter- 
nally to the race for which he died. He is 
now the first-fruits of the redeemed, the 
first-born from the dead. Our freedom was 
made manifest in him first, that from him 
might spring forth a new stream of life in 
the desert, and he become the beginner of 
a new race that lives in the power of indis- 
soluble life. 



62 BEYOND THE GRAVE. * 

He assumed and bore our servitude when 
he bound himself indissolubly to us. His 
freedom was at the same time the morning 
dawn of our deliverance, who are his breth- 
ren, and ought to be. For that reason Paul 
not merely calls him the Prince of Life, as 
Peter does (Acts iii. 15), but combines him 
and us most intimately, — calling him the 
first-born from the dead (Col. i. 18), the 
first-fruits of them that slept (1 Cor. xv. 20). 
Thus we may perceive by Christ's resurrec- 
tion how necessarily redemption and resur- 
rection belong together, and at the same 
time perceive what is the essential meaning 
of the resurrection, viz., that it is the begin- 
ning of what the apostle calls the glorious 
liberty of the children of God, who at pres- 
ent wait for the redemption of their bodies 
(Rom. viii. 21-23). 

THE NEW EPOCH OF LIFE. 

With the resurrection begins a new pe- 
riod, the epoch of the blessed eternity, in 
which we shall first experience what it real- 
ly is to live. For then not only will there 
be no more sorrow, crying, and pain, but, 



THE NEW EPOCH. 63 

above all, " there shall be no more death " 
(Rev. xxi. 4). Picture the dominion of 
death. In many thousands of instances it 
does not suffer life to grow up ; it carries 
off the half of mankind before the first year 
of life. We stand beside the graves of our 
children, and ask, why did they die ? What 
have they of that life which God's decree 
has allotted to us in the measure of 70 to 80 
years? Did he not mean we should lead, 
use, and bear life so long before we can 
die blessed ? In many thousands of other 
instances death casts its shadow backward 
into the life of such, of whom we may say 
they were born for suffering, and hardly 
ever in their lives could they be glad, be- 
cause death so long and painfully con- 
sumed them. But in every instance what 
a lamentable goal and end of life is death ! 
so unworthy of men, so little human ! Ev- 
ery tie of love is relentlessly broken. Where 
it should eternally be said there is compan- 
ionship, it is said there is loneliness (wo es 
fur ewig heissen sollte : gemeinsam^ heisst es 
einsanz). Death is as a mockery and deri- 
sion of all love, of all endeavor, of every 



64 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

purpose, of every struggle of man. Nobil- 
ity, art, wisdom — all must return to dust. 

The hope of resurrection removes the 
ban that rests on our hearts. In the res- 
urrection of the dead and the blessed resto- 
ration of life it will become manifest that 
our children who died an early death were 
not born in vain. And so many, whose 
life was only suffering, and whose lips only 
asked, Lord, wherefore? will then still be 
glad of their life. And it will then be per- 
ceived, likewise, that the fellowship of love 
need never end. The resurrection brings 
the compensation — the more than rich com- 
pensation, for everything that life in this 
world of death denies us; and we under- 
stand why it is the Lord himself tells us to 
wait for it in order to find redress, amends, 
and everything for which a man may wait 
and hope who longs for the salvation of 
God and the redemption of his life (Luke 
xx. 35, 36; comp. Matt. xix. 27-29; Mark 
x. 29, 30 ; Luke xiv. 14). Truly it has a 
wonderful meaning, and one cannot smile 
at the simplicity, but can only sympathize, 
when love writes on the monuments of its 



THE NEW EPOCH. 65 

departed, or self-denying faith confesses 
what is able to heal the breaking hearts, 
" I have hope toward God that there shall 
be a resurrection of the dead." 

Resurrection hope is an essential part of 
Christian faith, of faith in redemption. Our 
Easter festivals become the celebration in 
advance of the great day of redemption, as 
they are the after -celebration of that first 
day of the redemption. 

We stand between the two Easters. By 
virtue of the first Easter we go to meet 
the last Easter, if we have entered into 
possession of the redemption purchased for 
us. The possession of redemption, the state 
of grace in which the assurance of the res- 
urrection of Christ preserves us, guarantees 
to us at the same time the future. The 
resurrection from death is guaranteed to us 
by the facts of our inner life. 

RESURRECTION GUARANTEED BY INWARD EXPE- 
RIENCE. 

As death does not come upon us without 
our previously having in us the cause of 
death, viz., sin, whereby the powers of death 
S 



66 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

work in us, so too we do not attain to the 
resurrection from death unless death's do- 
minion over us be destroyed, its sting taken 
away, and powers of resurrection become 
operative in us. But that the dominion of 
death and the power of sin is broken must 
be and is something to be inwardly per- 
ceived, just as much as is the painful fact 
that by nature and our own guilt we are 
sold under sin and fallen under the ban of 
death and judgment. We can experience 
and judge in our inward life the reality, 
truth, and actuality of redemption that has 
become manifest in the resurrection of 
Christ. For him who has voluntarily en- 
tered into fellowship with Christ, the fact 
of restored peace with God through re- 
demption, the fact of deliverance from guilt 
and judgment, is just as indisputable as is 
the fact of guilt and enmity against God. 
It is only requisite for this that one should 
be inwardly united with him who bore our 
punishment, and that one should take on 
himself the condemnation of the cross in 
the fashion of Paul, who says, " I am cruci- 
fied with Christ ;" " we have become united 



RESURRECTION GUARANTEED. 67 

with his death " (Gal. ii. 19 ; Rom. vi. 5). 
Then we will also be like the resurrection. 
The fact of our resurrection, the self -con- 
sciousness of faith that no logic can de- 
stroy, guarantees to us the future, viz., free- 
dom, full immunity from death. The pow- 
ers of death, from which our souls have es- 
caped in faith on Jesus, can hold nothing 
about us captive. Since we have part in 
the redemption, of which the Redeemer 
himself is the first-fruits, we know that we 
shall be like him. 

We would not, perhaps, ourselves vent- 
ure to think of a resurrection. But since 
the thought is given by the resurrection of 
Christ, and the word of God, that grain of 
mustard-seed of our faith, assures us of it, 
now we perceive, also, that thereby is really 
given us the very word for an inconceiva- 
bly great matter. We find no reason in 
our inward life and experience to doubt 
such communication and promise of God's 
word. Everything agrees with our inward 
experience, as is ever the wont with God's 
word. Only he can still doubt who is a 
stranger to such experience, and as indif- 



68 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ferent to it as to the inquiry about inhabit- 
ants of the moon. 

What we have in the believing possession 
of redemption is the beginning of eternal 
life even in this life, and this is- the oppo- 
site of what we brought with us into the 
world by our birth, viz., death. That death 
will eventually be overcome by this life is 
beyond doubt for him who by virtue of 
this beginning goes to meet eternal life, 
albeit he still meets the death of this body. 
For this reason this beginning of eternal 
life is a state of progress to " attain unto 
the resurrection of the dead " (Phil. iii. n) ; 
and in this respect it contrasts with the 
natural motion and direction of life, which 
is to " bring forth fruit unto death " (Rom. 
vii. 5 ; vi. 21, sqq.). " Because I live, ye shall 
live also," says our Lord to his disciples, in 
view of his resurrection. Since this prom- 
ise has an initial fulfilment in the inward 
exemption from condemnation and destruc- 
tion, it is at the same time, as experience 
of the inward life, a guaranteed prophecy 
of the future, unless some blighting frost 
or wantonness destroy the blossoms. The 



RESURRECTION GUARANTEED. 69 

renewing that happens to us in the com- 
munion of Christ is already an actual par- 
ticipation in the resurrection. J/y life there 
became free from the bands of death, though 
centuries lie between. " God has raised us 
up with Christ " (comp. Eph. ii. 6 ; Col. iii. 
i ; Rom. vi. 5) says the apostle ; and the 
certainty of the full communion with Christ 
and all that he possesses testifies to us that 
this inward experience of the redemption 
will eventually be consummated in the 
complete freedom of the children of God. 
For nothing that Christ has taken part in 
with us is excepted from the redemption. 
Like as he himself, according to his human 
nature, experienced redemption in himself, 
so it must in like measure be shared by 
those who are bound to him, not merely by 
thoughts, but by a life like his in faith. 
Wonderful is the beginning of everlasting 
life in us. But whoever has received eter- 
nal life here below, to him the wonderful 
consummation and developed result is just 
as certain as otherwise death and destruc- 
tion are irrevocably certain. 

The apostle refers us to these experiences 



70 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

and facts of our inner life as unassaila- 
ble guarantees of the future resurrection 
when he says that the Holy Spirit, the gift 
of first-fruits to us, is the earnest of our in- 
heritance until the day of redemption (Eph. 
i. 14), in virtue of which we wait for the re- 
demption of our body (Rom. viii. 23 ; comp. 
2 Cor. v. 5). Or when he says, "And if 
Christ be in you, the body is dead because 
of sin (forfeited to death), but the Spirit is 
life because of righteousness. But if the 
Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the 
dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ 
from the dead shall also quicken your mor- 
tal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in 
you " (Rom. viii. 10, 1 1). On account of 
our present habits of thinking we need to 
use some pains to accustom ourselves to 
the great significance of our bodies, that 
we only receive life as bound to the body, 
and that we must be careful so to keep life 
in reality (Ps. xvi. 8-1 1). Every attempt to 
preserve our life is wrecked at last by death. 
Hence the apostle sighs, "O wretched man 
that I am ! who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death ?" (Rom. vii, 24). And 



HEAVENLY BLISS. 7 I 

hence the certainty of the redemption gives 
him the certainty of the resurrection. 

BLISS POSSIBLE WHILE AWAITING RESURRECTION. 

This connection between the hope of 
resurrection and the experiences of inner 
life has especial importance in two other 
directions. In the first place, it becomes 
plain to us how a life of bliss is possible 
after this life, in the period that intervenes 
till the resurrection. If by virtue of the 
Spirit of adoption and redemption we can 
be blessed in hope even now, in spite of 
this life in the body, oppressed as it is with 
the burden of mortality, how much more 
will that be a blissful state when we have 
laid aside this body of sin, even if it be not 
a state of completion. One who is born 
again leads a divided life. Inwardly he has 
begun eternal life, while as to flesh and 
blood he is subject to death. This discord, 
that can become intensified to the keenest 
suffering, and even extort the prayer, " It 
is enough ; now, Lord, take away my life/* 
is terminated by death, so that one may 
have not only cheerful courage in view of 



72 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

death, but also a longing for death, like 
Paul, who says, " I have a desire to depart 
and be with Christ " (Phil. i. 23). This is, 
however, still consistent with saying, " We 
would rather not be unclothed, but clothed 
upon, that mortality might be swallowed 
up of life M (2 Cor. v. 4). The eternal life of 
such as shall be perfected, not by transfigu- 
ration but by resurrection, has, so to speak, 
three stages — the beginning of eternal life 
in this life, blessedness after death, perfec- 
tion of glory in the resurrection. 

HOPE OF RESURRECTION PROMOTES SANCTIFICA- 
TION. 

The second thing to which this connec- 
tion between hope of resurrection and the 
experiences and facts of our inner life points, 
is the importance that sanctification has for 
the resurrection. When we have entered 
on possession of redemption and eternal 
life, we are directed to follow the way in 
which we must wait for and hasten to the 
great approaching day of the redemption, 
and go to meet the resurrection of the 
dead. This being so, it concerns us that 



SANCTIFICATION. 73 

eternal life should become more and more 
a second nature to us. We must let the 
powers of life penetrate us more and more. 
Whatever opposes the spirit of life must be 
subdued ; whatever promotes death must 
be shunned ; whatever may conduct us to 
death must be removed and renounced. 
The original connection of our personal 
life and will with sin is dissolved, and our 
soul has acquired a new independence to- 
wards our inbred sinful nature. Now it be- 
hooves us to cherish more and more faith- 
fully the communion of the Spirit of Christ, 
that life may become ever stronger and 
death ever weaker. Then the resurrection 
hope, supported by the inner life, will de- 
velop, ever fuller and more confident of tri- 
umph, the more intimate the communion 
with the Lord becomes, of which the apos- 
tle says, " he that is joined unto the Lord is 
one spirit " (i Cor. vi. 17 ; 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18). 

HOW ARE THE DEAD RAISED? 

How the resurrection hope shall eventu- 
ally be realized is a question that we may 
and must quietly leave to the future and 



74 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

with the Prince of Life. For it will hardly 
be possible for us to represent to ourselves 
the manner in which the renewing of our 
bodies shall take place. Only we must hold 
firmly to two things : First, there must be 
maintained a connection between our pres- 
ent bodies and the resurrection body, for 
in the resurrection is to be made manifest 
" the redemption of our body." This con- 
nection is emphasized in the apostolic con- 
fession of faith by the strong expression, 
" resurrection of the flesh," and thus all re- 
finements of the resurrection hope are dis- 
countenanced. If there is to be a resurrec- 
tion, we must find our own identity in the 
new body. The second thing on which we 
must insist is, that this connection, which 
Paul illustrates by the dying grain of wheat 
and its corresponding fruit (i Cor. xv. 36- 
38), consists with the exclusion of every- 
thing in which the consequences of sin and 
the powers of death have asserted them- 
selves here below, so that the corporeal 
part of us, as originally and divinely consti- 
tuted, shall come to its glorious develop- 
ment. Whatever was and could be pene- 



HOW ARE THE DEAD RAISED? 75 

trated by the powers of eternal life is car- 
ried over. The remainder is passed away, 
forfeited to dust and given back to earth, 
which itself waits for renovation. There- 
fore the rule obtains, " It is sown corrupti- 
ble, it will rise incorruptible ; it is sown in 
dishonor, it will rise in glory ; it is sown in 
weakness, it will rise in power ; it is sown 
a natural body (literally, a body belonging 
to the soul, determined by the soul that is 
estranged from God), it will rise a spiritual 
body, penetrated and united with the life 
that is from God. The corruptible must 
put on incorruption, and the mortal immor- 
tality (1 Cor. xv. 42-44, 53). 

This is the way the apostle replies to 
the question, " How are the dead raised, 
and with what manner of body do they 
come?" (1 Cor. xv. 35), a question by which, 
even in his time, some thought to disprove 
the resurrection, and perhaps even to make 
it appear ridiculous. It is the only place 
where the Scripture gives us some clew as 
to the How of the resurrection ; and w r e 
must guard against making highly colored 
inferences from the apostle's words. He 



76 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

evidently (i Cor. xv. 45) contemplates the 
earthly body, even previous to the coming 
of sin and its consequence death, as prelim- 
inary to what should be, so that now the 
resurrection, sin having intervened, brings 
us to the goal to which God originally des- 
tined us. When we consider how much the 
apostle insists on the connection between 
the resurrection body and our present cor- 
poreality, we will not incorrectly represent 
the difference between the original divine 
purpose and what we have now to hope for, 
if we say, instead of the transfiguration of 
our bodies according to the original divine 
purpose, there only remains the possibility 
of their transformation. Those whom the 
day of the Lord shall find still living escape, 
indeed, death ; but in place of death they 
will be changed ; they will not be unclothed 
but clothed upon (1 Cor. xv. 52; 2 Cor. v. 4; 
1 Thess. iv. 16, sq.). We shall no more be 
hindered in the free use of the gift of life, 
but in our measure will be like him who 
according to the Father's will should be 
the first-born among many brethren. " We 
look," it is said, " for the Lord Jesus Christ, 



HOW ARE THE DEAD RAISED? 77 

who shall change our vile body, that it may 
be fashioned like unto his glorious body " 
(Phil. iii. 20, 21). The resurrection is the 
key-stone in the process of realizing in us 
the redemption that has been accomplished 
for us. In it and along with it will be re- 
newed all that death has destroyed. And 
when from the dust of so many thousand 
years a redeemed human race shall arise, 
then will be manifest the glorious freedom 
of the children of God, in which all creation 
will participate. Then all things will be- 
come new, and in the renovated world will 
no voice of weeping and lament be heard 
any more. There no suffering nor cry nor 
pain shall any more be, and nothing shall 
be heard of a discord between man and the 
world about him. 

If we must be content with this, without 
being able to penetrate further the glory 
of the resurrection or of the regeneration 
of all things, still we know that we must be 
content only because these things surpass 
the power of thought. What it is to be 
redeemed is not something to be thought 



78 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

out, but to be experienced ; and after all, 
when the hour comes, we too shall be "like 
those that dream. " 

THE RESURRECTION OF THE WICKED. 

But we have still another thing to take 
into consideration. So far the resurrection 
has appeared to us as a necessary part of re- 
demption, and only as such. But we know 
that all are to rise from the dead — some to 
life, some to judgment — righteous and un- 
righteous (Dan. xii. 2; Jno. v. 25, 28, 29; 
Acts xxiv. 15). What of the resurrection 
of those who have no share in redemp- 
tion ? On what is it founded ? What shall 
it be? 

The dead in Christ shall rise first, when 
the Lord shall come at the end of the world. 
This is the first resurrection (1 Thess. iv. 16 ; 
Rev. xx. 5 sqq.). After that is the end, 
the second resurrection. All will rise, for 
Christ has redeemed all ; and even those 
who in unbelief have despised this redemp- 
tion will experience how wide-reaching and 
world -comprehending this redemption is. 
Their resurrection will testify to them that 



THE SECOND RESURRECTION. 79 

they too needed not to have abode in 
death. But because they did not accept 
the redemption and made no use of it, they 
have come to be so indissolubly bound to 
death that they are able only to give a 
look at the glory now irrevocably lost to 
them, a look of apprehension that arouses 
every sensibility and enhances their pain to 
the utmost. The resurrection gives noth- 
ing to them. It only seals their fate, an 
eternal continuance of death. This, says 
the Scripture, so darkly and sadly, is the 
second death (Rev. xx. 14; comp. ii. 11). 
For them the resurrection is only the tran- 
sition from the intermediate place and ves- 
tibule of the realm of death to the final 
penalty of condemnation. After they have 
received what properly appertains to them 
of the redemption, they must depart eter- 
nally whither the power of sin, of unbelief, 
and of death irresistibly impels them, vol- 
untarily, and yet against their will, into 
eternal remoteness from God, into eternal 
deprivation of light and of life. They are 
dead, ruined. For them all that God has 
thought, done, prepared, is lost. Such is 



80 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the second resurrection. Yet, perhaps, in 
the second resurrection even those will cel- 
ebrate a resurrection of life who only after 
this life could learn to know the Saviour, 
and then believed on him and were con- 
verted to him.* 

Then at once all struggling and sighing 
of the creation has an end. All will par- 
ticipate in the glorious freedom of the 
children of God, and the Lord redeems his 
word, " Behold, I make all things new." 
Then the separation between heaven the 
place of the blessed, and earth, that has 
continued till then, will cease to exist. The 
earth will no longer stand in a position 
between the realm of death and heaven ; 
but heaven and earth will again constitute 
a connected whole, and the tabernacle, the 
sanctuary of God, will be with the children 
of men. Such is the future that lies be- 
yond the grave. 

* See translator's note at the end, pp. 112-117. 



III. 

RESURRECTION DELAYED THAT THE GOSPEL 
MAY BE PREACHED. 

The resurrection day draws near only by 
the road of history. The redeeming word, 
" It is finished, ,, does not immediately and 
magically transform the world of the curse, 
the ground that bears thorns and thistles 
(Heb. vi. 8), into a garden of God, and 
translate mankind out of a land of misery 
and of alienation into the heavenly para- 
dise. Man went voluntarily the way which, 
then, against his will conducted him away 
from paradise. The past was justly closed 
up and return debarred to him. Only the 
divine decree of redemption made it pos- 
sible for the sinful world to continue in 
existence. Else would the judgment have 
taken place at once in the beginning of 
history. Now it has been postponed by 
the patience of God that it might event- 
6 



82 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ually be taken away. By virtue of the 
promise history began, that mankind might 
return to the forsaken fountain of life, to 
the living God. Mankind as a whole has 
the promise ; the fulfilment concerns all 
mankind ; the condition, too, concerns all 
mankind. With the accomplished fulfil- 
ment of redemption in Christ the last time 
began, and the end itself, the last day, the 
day of resurrection, draws near. But it can 
now not otherwise or sooner appear than 
when all mankind has learned to know 
their salvation, and had opportunity to 
decide whether they will have everlasting 
life from this redemption, or will persevere 
without God in their own way. Therefore 
the gospel of the kingdom must before be 
preached to all nations for a witness. Then 
the end will come. This is what still de- 
lays both the final and utmost development 
of godlessness, the mystery of iniquity, and 
also the second coming of the Lord for the 
redemption of his own. For this reason 
alone we still stand between the two East- 
ers. How is it then for us, and how is it 
at present with the state after death ? 



HEAVENLY BLISS. 8$ 

THE PRESENT BLESSEDNESS OF HEAVEN. 

It does not yet appear what we shall be 
(i John iii. 2). This is applicable here. For 
what we shall be will first appear when the 
corruptible shall put on incorruption, and 
the mortal immortality, i.e., when the Lord 
comes again. But the realm of death is no 
longer the place of those who have, by faith, 
laid hold on salvation. Having become par- 
takers of salvation, they have already, in this 
life, begun the eternal life. The realm of 
death can no longer be the place for them, 
for they would then not be partakers of sal- 
vation if the consequences of death were 
still manifested in them. We die accord- 
ing to the law of our birth ; we live accord- 
ing to the law of the new birth, the re- 
demption. When we die, life must there- 
fore also become manifest. We belong to 
Christ, whom the heaven has received un- 
til the times of restoration of all things, 
whereof God spake by the mouth of his 
prophets (Acts iii. 21). Therefore not the 
realm of death, Hades, but the place where 
Christ is, the superterrestrial blessed world 



84 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

of the yet hidden, unfailing possessions — in 
a word, heaven — there is the place of those 
who in faith die blessed. Here below their 
life is hid with Christ in God (Col. iii. 1-3). 
Their inheritance is not in this world, nor 
yet is it something in progress of becoming. 
It is there, and is laid up for them as an in- 
heritance incorruptible and undefiled, and 
that fadeth not away (1 Pet. i. 3, 4) ; as also 
the kingdom of God, the sum total of all 
bliss and of all redemptive possessions, has 
from all eternity its locality above as king- 
dom of heaven, until it also shall fill the 
world on this side. For the present, if we 
may venture so to speak, heaven is the in- 
termediate place of believers, instead of the 
realm of death, until all becomes new, and 
it is said on earth, " Behold the tabernacle 
of God is with men " (Rev. xxi. 1 sqq.). 

Such is the change that has taken place 
with reference to Hades, the realm of death. 
It is no longer the place of sojourn for those 
who, by faith, have received and entered on 
their participation in redemption. When 
they come to die and depart out of this 
world, where they as little belong forever 



HEAVENLY BLISS. 85 

as the Lord, there is for them beyond the 
grave no more continuance of death. The 
angels of God bear their souls thither where 
Christ has preceded them, to heaven, the 
place of eternal life and of the glory of God, 
there to be till they and all saints shall be 
revealed from thence with Christ. Hence 
Paul says (Phil. i. 23), " I have a desire to de- 
part and be with Christ," for with him it is 
self-evident that Christ's high-priestly prayer 
is heard now and forever: " Father, I will 
that where I am they also may be with me, 
that they may behold my glory which thou 
hast given me " (John xvii. 24). Heaven, 
known in the Old Testament only as the 
unapproachable place of superterrestrial di- 
vine majesty and glory, is, in the New 
Testament, opened also to men, so far as 
they partake of the redemption and are in 
possession of it. It is there now for men, 
and instead of the prospect into the ob- 
scure silence and desert of Hades, there is 
the view of a land of light, which, because 
imperishable and never-fading and pure, far 
transcends all the glory of the earth, that 
is stung by the worm of death and perish- 



86 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ableness, or vanity, as the Scripture calls it. 
And heaven is not to open to us only a long 
time after death, as it did to Old Testament 
saints, but immediately after this life, and 
for his sake who redeemed us and is now 
there above, and because we are redeemed, 
and are not yet to be redeemed, as those 
ancient saints when they died. 

Heaven is not the consummation, which 
does not take place until the resurrection ; 
but it is bliss. Waiting for the consumma- 
tion does not exclude bliss. It is already 
bliss here below to know one's self to be 
redeemed, and to be able to say in the 
power of redemption, amid all the present 
labor and trouble, Wherefore we faint not, 
but though our outward man is decaying, 
yet our inward man is renewed day by day 
(2 Cor. iv. 16). So, then, it is at length 
truly bliss to be exempt from all labor and 
trouble, to be translated into the world of 
imperishable, undefiled, unfading existence, 
from which proceed the powers that we 
taste even here (Heb. vi. 4). Waiting for 
the consummation does not diminish the 
bliss, for that already here below even forms 



HEAVENLY BLISS. 87 

a part of the blessedness of believers. It is 
itself a component part of heavenly bliss, 
and so much the more since, when once 
there, all that makes waiting hard, all bit- 
ter experiences in ourselves and from the 
world about us, all the laments and wrest- 
lings to which the psalmist bears witness 
(Ps. xlii. 2j), lie behind us. The bliss af- 
ter death is not yet that complete, glori- 
ous freedom of the children of God, and 
yet those who are there feel nothing but 
freedom and peace. There is nothing left 
of the fettered condition, of the creation's 
subjection to vanity and to the service of 
what is transitory (Rom. viii. 20 sq.). As 
the life of faith below is a life out of faith 
into faith, a progress from power to power 
(Rom. i. 17 ; Ps. lxxxiv. 8 ; Isa. xl. 29 sqq.), 
so above and after this life it is a progress 
from bliss to bliss, from glory to glory. All 
affliction is unqualifiedly at an end, for the 
present world from which believers are re- 
moved lies at their feet. As the patience 
of the Lord does not destroy his bliss, so 
still less will the waiting for the consum- 
mation destroy the bliss of those who are 



88 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

with him (comp. 2 Pet. iii. 9 ; 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8, 
18). When the apostle would rather live 
to see the day of consummation and un- 
dergo change, instead of dying before the 
day of the Lord (2 Cor. v. 4), it is not be- 
cause bliss does not begin already after 
death — on the contrary, he knows that 
after his departure he will be with Christ 
(Phil. i. 23) — but it is because he would, if 
permissible, be exempt from the experience 
of death. For death is and remains an en- 
emy (1 Cor. xv. 26), and whoever must suf- 
fer it finds it an affliction that must be borne 
and overcome. But it can also be overcome 
by the believer, even though before the 
conflict he shudders at it ; for he can say, 
" I can do all things through Christ who 
strengtheneth me." For some it will be a 
wrestling hard and painful, yet without be- 
ing conquered ; and for others it will be as 
with Stephen — " its face was as the face of 
an angel. ,, And at last all that are made 
blessed will even give the praise, Thou canst 
lead through the doors of death dreaming. 
Such is the song of praise of the spirits of 
just ones made perfect (Heb. xii. 23). 



A BLESSED DEATH. 89 

WHAT MAKES A BLESSED DEATH ? 

And now a word about blessed dying it- 
self. That is not blessed dying when sim- 
ply the pains of the body cease to be 
felt, the sensibilities discontinue, the senses 
gradually and softly evanish, the features 
become smooth, and the last breath soft- 
ly passes away. Mostly, indeed, the end 
comes thus, so that the body, and the soul 
that is bound to the body, just because it is 
still so bound, do not feel how the bands 
are loosed. This is a beneficent thing for 
all, be they blessed afterwards or not ; and 
it is not good, it is no kindness, to console 
with this prospect those w 7 ho have cause 
to shudder at what comes with and after 
death. The thing of importance is, what 
will be the awaking ? Many a one without 
hope may have in this way a gentle end. 
Likely the most will have this, and those, 
perhaps, above all, who have not been used, 
when living and in their senses, to go about 
with thoughts of death. 

No ; a blessed death is something else. 
It is where one in the full possession of his 



90 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

faculties has prayed for a rational and be- 
lieving end, and receives help, by the com- 
fort and assurance of the Holy Spirit, to die 
according to faith ; and if once more before 
the end the soul feels what it is to die, and 
that dying and death are not merely con- 
sumption of muscular fibre, the organs be- 
coming callous, and " chemistry of corrup- 
tion/' but something proceeding from the 
judgment of God — if then by such help 
one keeps the faith, that is a blessed death. 
There we experience in a profound degree, 
perhaps never felt before, what conscience 
is. Nothing of the whole life has passed 
away, though life is now ending. Our en- 
tire life presents itself before us — deeds, 
thoughts, impressions long in the past, yet 
not passed away. They themselves do not 
revive ; but the form that they have given 
to the inner man presents itself to the eye 
as the panorama of our being. This is 
what I am, not what I was. I must accuse 
myself and testify against myself ; and shall 
I dare to hope ? And yet, Lord Jesus, help 
me to believe that thou hast covered up all 
— to believe that where sin has been mighty 



A BLESSED DEATH. 9 1 

grace is still more mighty ! I do not let 
thee go ; I am lost, and yet in thy hands ! 
I have nothing but thy compassion ; nothing 
to cast into the scale but that I take refuge 
in thee and flee to free grace ! I will even 
believe, and then I shall have help to keep 
the faith and to confess. I know that my 
Redeemer lives, and to him into whose 
hands I commend my soul I commit also 
all that are mine, and even those against 
whom I have sinned, that he, through so 
much the richer grace, may indemnify them 
for the harm I have done their souls. That 
will be a blessed death, because it is a be- 
lieving death. For one so dying, even the 
abatement of sensations, of the presenti- 
ments of death felt in the body, serve to 
make faith easier. And as the believer at 
the close of every day's work goes to sleep 
with a praying heart, and his going to sleep, 
not outwardly indeed, and in appearance, 
yet inwardly, is different from that of oth- 
ers, so is it also when he finally falls asleep. 
Outwardly he may not differ from others, 
but inwardly he does. His last dream is 
not some blissful but vanishing illusion, 



92 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

but a dream that emerges in a waking, of 
which it may be said, when the Lord shall 
redeem the captives of Zion, then shall we 
be like them that dream. It may truly be 
said that no one knows better or feels more 
keenly what death and dying mean than 
a believing child of God ; because to him 
death and dying are things most unnatural. 
Only the mouth of a believer could sing us 
the song: In the midst of life we are still 
by death surrounded. Whither shall we 
look for one, help and grace providing? 
In the midst of death we feel the jaws of 
hell assail us. Who will bring to such dis- 
tress release and liberty? To the midst 
of hell and pains our sins drive us away. 
What then shall our refuge be, where our 
souls may stay? Alone in thee, O Christ. 
Thy dear blood was spilt to take away our 
guilt ! Holy Lord God, holy mighty God, 
holy merciful God, thou eternal God, suf- 
fer us not to fall from the comfort of true 
faith. Kyrie eleison ! 

Since, however, the Holy Spirit of God 
and of our Saviour cannot remind one 
where there is nothing to be found that 



PERFECT IN HOLINESS. 93 

may be remembered, one must learn dying 
while the body is sound and the faculties 
awake. One must impress on his mind the 
word of God that should do one good in 
death, and in the vigor of youth and man- 
hood learn by heart the dying songs that 
he would like to pray when words fail him, 
and when he is too weak and wretched to 
search for them. 

HOW ARE THE SOULS OF BELIEVERS AT DEATH 
MADE PERFECT IN HOLINESS? 

But how is it with sin, that clings to us 
here below to the last moment, and makes 
us so sluggish in running the race set be- 
fore us ? Is it thereby done away, in that 
the body is given to death ? or because at 
the reappearing of the Lord the body is 
changed ? And if one does not live to see 
the day of the Lord, has he only to die in 
order to become free from sin ? Does it 
make no difference "how far one has got 
on in sanctification," or how long and how 
truly one has lived in faith ? Are there 
not degrees of bliss? Is there to be found 
beyond the grave only an indistinguishable 



94 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

likeness of all the blessed ? Must one not 
suppose that there will still be room for a 
development to perfection, to complete sin- 
lessness, to perfect ripeness of the image 
of God ? 

As for degrees of bliss, the Scripture no- 
where says anything about them. And if it 
did, one would unqualifiedly say with the 
psalmist, "I had rather be a door-keeper 
in the house of my God, than dwell in the 
tents of wickedness." This saying, how- 
ever, relates to this side of the grave and 
not the other. Blessedness is complete 
satiety, peace, and joy in the experience 
of the grace and favor of God, an enjoy- 
ment of the unspeakable love of God. De- 
grees of blessedness can hardly be con- 
ceived of where God fills the hungry with 
good things. Those that hunger most 
must be those who most feel the need of 
grace ; and in respect to neediness, and the 
measure of craving, no one of those above 
will be behind the others. It may be 
urged, however, that there must be greater 
susceptibility in such as have long held out 
faithfully here below, and pursued sanctifi- 



PERFECT IN HOLINESS. 95 

cation, and thus have become inwardly- 
riper for the blessed eternity. But leaving 
out of view what is often falsely understood 
as sanctification, this objection is not ten- 
able because of another consideration. For 
how alone is the last remnant of sin blotted 
out ? We know that even here below. It is 
by beholding God. All overcoming comes 
about here below by the upward look- 
ing of faith. The more I hold the grace 
and glory of my God fixedly and clearly in 
view, the more unreservedly I let God's 
light shine into my heart, the freer I be- 
come. Yet not I effect that, but God's 
blessed, redeeming grace shines into the 
heart of him who, instead of shrinking back, 
prostrates himself before God in repent- 
ance and prayer. God helps such to be- 
lieve, and that is the constantly recurring 
experience of faith, as it is said, u God 
cleansed their hearts by faith" (Acts xv. 9). 
By the faith that God works the heart is 
not merely cleansed from the guilt and 
burden of sin, but also from the pleasure 
in sin. And when at length he permits us 
to behold him, then it would be simply 



96 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

apostasy were sin again to find a lodging 
in us; as for its dwelling there then, such 
a thing is not to be mentioned. The joy 
of the Lord, that here below even is the 
power and strength of his believing ones, 
will be all and everything to us above. In 
this fire sin is consumed, when we see the 
eye of God turned on us with a brightness 
and fulness of love that we could never 
have anticipated. Not that we behold 
God, but that he beholds us; that melts 
sin away. It is he himself that refines the 
gold. What God requires that he also 
gives ; this truth has then and there above 
its most blessed fulfilment. Therefore it 
is such a blessed saying, " Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
Therefore, whoever is so oppressed by daily 
experience of sin that, spite of his fleeing 
to grace, he can hardly think it possible 
for him to be blessed, may still venture to 
rejoice. The burden that he finds the 
hardest to bear will there be removed, and 
" it will be given to him to array himself in 
pure white silk [linen] ; for the silk is the 
righteousness of the saints" (Rev. xix. 8). 



NO DEGREES IN BLISS. 97 

The garments of all the saints are washed 
in the blood of the Lamb ; nothing else 
takes away out of our hearts even the last 
remnant of sinful desire but the grace in 
the Lamb's blood. 

ARE THERE DEGREES OF BLESSEDNESS? 

There is no denying, indeed, that many 
of us, alas how many! will become blessed 
only as brands saved from the fire. And 
how many look back on a life of faith that 
bears little trace of being such a life ! The 
hand of the Lord has held them up from 
utterly falling. But their lives have been 
spent without fruit, for they lacked fidelity 
in faith and prayer. The first love did not 
long hold out, and on the approach of death 
they need to seek again an almost forfeited 
grace. How is it in such a case? Does 
that then make no difference in the blessed- 
ness? Will not such an one be inferior to 
others? will he not need in eternity to be- 
gin over again, as it were, to make up for 
the neglect here below ? 

Notwithstanding — we hold to it — there 
are no degrees of blessedness ; not even for 
7 



98 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

those who have only so just come to rights 
as not to have become believing in vain. 
For he that is graciously pardoned is wholly 
pardoned. It does not conflict with this 
that the apostle speaks of some building 
on the one foundation Jesus Christ, wood, 
hay, stubble ; and others gold, silver, costly 
stones (1 Cor. iii. 11-15). Blessedness de- 
pends on the foundation on which one has 
built. 

But the place one occupies in the whole 
church above is another thing. Even here 
below we are members of one body, and 
every member is to contribute help to the 
others according to its measure. No one 
has his faith and his state of grace only for 
himself, but also for the good of others. 
This puts faith to the test where it must 
show what it is. The outward organization 
of the church of God on earth, official and 
non-official, does not coincide with the in- 
ward organization. Thus a person may be 
in a position for doing a specially blessed 
service for others, and yet his performance 
not correspond to his gifts and task ; for the 
fidelity belonging to the life of faith has 



NO DEGREES IN BLISS. 99 

flagged. Under these circumstances, then, 
the real organization of the body of Christ 
is developed that will present itself in the 
perfected church. All will be blessed that 
have come to the church above ; but the 
places they occupy will be different. To 
be with God in grace, that makes blessed ; 
being a blessing to men, that determines 
the relative place in the whole church. 
The measure of the future glory of each 
individual member depends on the fruit 
and blessing effected here below. There- 
fore there will be distinctions, or, if the ex- 
pression is preferred, degrees in the congre- 
gation of the blessed. But such distinction 
does not prejudice the blessedness ; for 
each one in his place is humbly happy, and 
perfectly happy and satisfied by the grace 
accorded to him. 

WHAT NOW OF UNBELIEVERS BEYOND THE 
GRAVE ? 

But the others who here below did not 
believe, and have not already here below 
begun the eternal life, still find their place 
in the realm of death. There, too, are such 



IOO BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

as have been unable to enter into the com- 
munion of the redemption. " How shall 
they believe in him whom they have not 
heard?" (Rom. x. 14). For until the last 
judgment can be reached the forecourt of 
the lost is still not closed. Many even now 
still continue death in Hades, while the 
others in heaven enjoy, unrestricted and 
unhindered, the eternal life begun on earth. 
We dare not, however, surrender ourselves 
to the thought that the future resurrection 
may bring about the universal redemption, 
and that instead of leaving the existing 
separation beyond the grave to continue, 
or intensifying it, it will completely abolish 
it. As we have said before, the resurrec- 
tion will be universal, that is to say, all will 
have part in it, for Christ made his redeem- 
ing sacrifice for all. But for those who 
have remained in sin spite of the redemp- 
tion, this resurrection will not be the com- 
mencement of a free blessed life. They 
receive from the redemption what properly 
appertains to them. Having risen they will 
give a look at the glory they despised, and 
then they must go back unto death. It is a 



HADES STILL OPEN. IOI 

new judgment on new sin. As we must all 
suffer under the consequences of the old, 
universal sin, but have a redemption from 
these consequences, so these must suffer 
anew under the new sin of rejecting Christ 
and his redemption. And as this new sin 
fundamentally is nothing more than the 
old sin consciously and voluntarily loved 
and held to, so also the judgment joins on 
to the previous judgment. Risen to life, 
yet, because the conditions of life are want- 
ing, they must return to death in a new and 
this time an eternal continuance of death. 
This is the second death or the other death, 
of which it is said, Death and the realm of 
death, and all that were therein, whose 
names were not written in the book of life, 
were cast into the fiery pool, that is the 
other death (Rev. xx. 14; ii. 11). They 
are ruined. The Scripture tells us nothing 
about an annihilation. We cannot say any- 
thing else than that this fate, in view of 
the provisions made by God's patient and 
untiring love for our unmerited redemp- 
tion, is only the expression of perfect and 
holy justice, and at sight of himself no oiie 



102 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

that shudders at it will be able to complain 
of injustice on the part of God. 

DO THE TORMENTS OF THE LOST DISTURB THE 
BLISS OF THE REDEEMED ? 

In view of others, however, pain and 
dread might seize us at this thought. It 
might be asked whether the smoke of their 
torment ascending for ever and ever, as the 
Scripture describes it, will not disturb the 
blessedness of the redeemed. Three things 
may be said in reply. In the first place, 
in the communion of love with the triune 
God all other love will be swallowed up, 
and in that and in eternal life every loss 
will be richly indemnified ; so that, at least, 
deprivation of loved ones is not to be men- 
tioned (Matt. xix. 29). And then, more- 
over, if, spite of the pains of his love (Jer. 
xxxi. 20), the bliss of God is not disturbed 
by the sufferings of his creatures that they 
have incurred by their own guilt, neither 
will the blessedness of the redeemed. For 
they cannot cherish greater love for the 
lost than God himself. But lastly, the 
contrast between the lost and the redeem- 



BLISS UNMOLESTED. 1 03 

ed does not consist merely in the different 
situations in which both are found, but also 
in a contrast of willing and being. On both 
sides reigns a tremendous union of freedom 
and of necessity. The lamentations of the 
lost are not lamentations of repentance, 
but lamentations of enchained hatred. 

WILL THERE BE A RESTORATION OF ALL 
THINGS ? 

What lies beyond this we may resigned- 
ly leave to the unfathomable love of God, 
knowing as we do that it is infinite, and 
that no sacrifice has been too great, no pa- 
tience too wearisome for him. It appears 
a beautiful thought, which some have en- 
tertained, and among them one of the most 
enlightened and thoughtful divines of the 
Christian Church— John Albrecht Bengel — 
that there will be a restoration of all things, 
in which even Satan will return to the foot- 
stool of love that created him, and will be 
blessed, if even as a stool at the feet of 
love, and as one permitted only to be at 
the door of the house of God. And who- 
ever makes earnest work of his own blessed- 



104 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ness might gladly cherish such thoughts 
for others. But in the archives and dooms- 
day book of holy love we do not find it 
written. We do, however, find the contrary 
expressed. 

IS CONVERSION AFTER DEATH POSSIBLE? 

We have now presented in grand out- 
lines the intimations of Scripture concern- 
ing " the other side of the grave 1 ' — outlines 
that one dares to fill out only with the 
most sacred chasteness, if he would escape 
falling into trivialities and shallow blunder- 
ing. Having done this, however, we can- 
not conclude without referring to, and, if 
possible, answering an inquiry often dis- 
cussed with earnest and loving interest, 
viz., the inquiry concerning the possibility 
of a conversion after this life. 

For us, indeed, the determination con- 
cerning what shall befall us beyond the 
grave rests wholly with this life, and the 
other side of the grave discloses to us the 
results of this side. But there are so many 
who here below have not had the opportu- 
nity of deciding for or against God, because 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. I05 

they do not know him and the provisions 
and works of his redeeming love. They 
belong partly to the remote heathen na- 
tions ; or the influences and tendency of 
their education, or their position in life, has 
at best brought them into contact with 
only the extremest wave -circle of God's 
word and of Christian spirit and life. Re- 
lations that have become historical, the 
environment into which they were born 
are largely to be blamed for their estrange- 
ment from God. And just those who are 
living Christians, and who must largely, and 
perhaps chiefly, connect the birth and un- 
folding of their inward life with family tra- 
dition, or that of the community to which 
they belong, or of their nationality, dare not 
ignore the power of relations that have be- 
come historical. Perhaps those, as preach- 
ers and churches, who have brought the 
gospel near to such, are themselves to 
blame, or at least are sharers in the blame 
of their repugnance to it. And then so 
many must die before they have opportu- 
nity to know the gospel and become aware 
of the grace of the calling. 



106 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

Now, in general, it obtains here that 
every one will be judged according to the 
measure of what he has received from 
God, and this Paul expresses in Rom. ii. 12, 
thus : " As many as have sinned without 
law shall also perish without law; and as 
many as have sinned under law shall be 
judged by law." He distinguishes here 
Jews and Gentiles. The heathen have not 
the law, but they are bound to obey what 
in their hearts their consciences testify to 
them concerning God and the worship they 
owe him, and concerning sin, righteousness, 
and judgment. The transgression of what 
is peculiar to the scripturally established 
law is not charged to them. In so far, 
however, as they have sinned against what 
they have, and because they have so sinned, 
they, too, are under condemnation. Just 
so there are in this respect two ways of 
being lost. It is this that we must in the 
first place apply to the total difference of 
men and their acquaintance or unacquaint- 
ance with the truth of God. 

But now, in the history of mankind, there 
has appeared a new revelation of God, des- 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. 1 07 

tined for all, intimately concerning all, viz., 
the revelation in his Son, in Christ Jesus, 
the redemption. No one now can be lost 
or blessed except as this is determined by 
his attitude towards Christ and the re- 
demption. Therefore, Peter says (i Pet. 
iii. 19, 20; iv. 6), the gospel was preached 
to the dead also, even to such as believed 
not in Noah's times, those heroes of unbe- 
lief and ungodliness. From this we must 
infer that in Hades, in the realm of death, 
there is still a preaching of the gospel, and 
that not for the purpose of bringing about 
a final decision opposed to God, and thus 
the last judicial ground for condemnation, 
but for the purpose of winning even the 
dead for the Lord's kingdom of heaven. 
And not merely is such the purpose, but it 
has this result, as Peter says: " For unto 
this end was the gospel preached even to 
the dead, that they might be judged ac- 
cording to men in the flesh, but live accord- 
ing to God in the spirit." That means, 
their earthly life is of course lost, and the 
consequences of this loss (so we must even 
conceive) they will have to bear at last (at 



108 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

the resurrection) ; but in the core of their 
personality a new life has sprung up that 
strives towards God and is of account be- 
fore him and has preservation. This preach- 
ing of the gospel in the realm of death was 
first undertaken by Christ himself — as, in 
the power of the spirit in which he was 
made alive, he went to the dead, even to 
the spirits in prison that in Noah's time be- 
lieved not, when God's patience set a final 
respite. We may from this, at the same 
time, infer an intimation as to how far the 
preaching in the realm of death extends. 
Compare the prophecy in Ezek. xvi. 53 : "I 
will bring again the captivity of Sodom." 

Therefore it is scriptural, and not con- 
trary to Scripture, to believe in the possi- 
bility of conversion in the realm of death, 
especially since, according to Rev. xx. 1 1- 
15, there are such in it whose names are 
found in the book of life at the future res- 
urrection and judgment. This conversion, 
however, is not effected by the terrors of 
Hades (purifying fire, purgatory), for Hades 
is, properly, no place of preparation for heav- 
en, neither is it an intermediate place be- 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. 109 

tween life on earth and heaven. It is essen- 
tially a vestibule of hell ; yet, just because 
it is this, and only this, there remains the 
possibility of a deliverance out of it. On 
earth conversion is effected only by the 
word of the gospel. But perhaps, yea prob- 
ably, those who come to know Christ and 
believe on him only when in the realm of 
death must wait (as the Old Testament 
saints once needed to wait) for deliverance 
out of it till the great resurrection and judg- 
ment day. So, I believe, I may venture to 
infer from the intimations about the first 
and second resurrection (Rev. xx. I ; I Cor. 
xv.). And it may be that in the end it will 
appear that a great part of those who have 
died within the ecclesiastical communions 
are to be found in this condition. 

We dare not go farther, and assume that 
conversion in the realm of death may be 
easier than in this world. Many a veil and 
hinderance to conversion that exists in this 
upper world may then be removed — in his- 
tory, in social life and intercourse, in toil, in 
distress for daily bread, in enervation, etc. — 
and the unobstructed view of the gloomy 



IIO BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

region of death and of its dominion may 
deeply wound the former frivolity, indeci- 
sion, and sloth. Still we dare not disregard 
the fact that death itself makes a conclusion 
in life ; and as the soul, when attaining the 
age of maturity, no longer has the pliability 
of boyhood, the elasticity of youth, so will 
this be true in a much greater degree where 
the result of an entire life, in the fashion of 
judicial effect, stamps the soul with its own 
impress. Along with the results of a lost 
or even a squandered life there goes also 
an inferior elasticity of spirit ; and as on 
earth the ability to form a moral resolution 
increases or decreases with one's greater or 
less moral fidelity, so the ability to make 
the resolution requisite for repentance and 
faith will, in the realm of death, be much 
reduced in every one who has not made 
earnest use of life in this world as a season 
of preparation for eternity. But the more 
thoroughly one has become accustomed to 
the present life, the more the soul will con- 
sume itself by the painful memory of, and 
fruitless longing for, a lost, an irrevocably 
lost season, and so much the less will it be 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. Ill 

capable of believingly losing itself in the 
future offered to it by the gospel so rich 
in grace. 

Those, therefore, that busy themsrelves 
with the question whether even now the 
realm of death can again open its gates to 
suffer its occupants to pass over into a life 
of bliss, have the most cogent reasons for 
not pressing the inquiry in their own in- 
terest, to postpone repentance. The ques- 
tion may only be proposed and answered 
in the interest of compassionate love. In 
that interest, however, the response derived 
from Scripture is full of comfort. With that 
we may confidently commend to the great, 
I would even say the inventive love of God, 
those who have died giving no sign or tes- 
timony that they have died in penitent 
faith. Perhaps God may employ many a 
Christian there above, who is mighty as a 
witness, to continue the preaching of the 
gospel among the dead. 

I will raise only one more question among 
the many that may still suggest themselves : 
Are there few that be saved ? To this, be- 
side the adjustment the question receives 



112 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

Luke xiii. 23 sqq., we have two answers in 
the Scripture. The first sounds dry and 
serious : " Many are called but few are cho- 
sen " (Matt. xxii. 24). This answer is for 
us. The other sounds hopeful and blessed, 
and is for those whom we love in God and 
Christ : " After these things I saw, and be- 
hold, a great multitude, which no man could 
number, out of every nation, and all tribes 
and peoples and tongues, standing before 
the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed 
in white robes, and palms in their hands" 
(Rev. vii. 9). 

[The reader will notice, that what the Author 
says on the subject of the possibility of conversion 
after death varies from the prevalent belief of the 
Christian Church regarding the teaching of Script- 
ure. Though the view he presents has been made 
prominent, of late, by the advocacy of highly es- 
teemed Biblical scholars, the older view still re- 
mains in the representative confessions of the 
Church, and as the prevalent belief. According to 
that belief, the opportunity of receiving the saving 
benefit of salvation is confined to the present life, 
and men shall be acquitted or condemned in the 
day of judgment " according to the deeds done in 
the body" (2 Cor. v. 10; Rom. ii. 6-1 1). To this 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. 113 

catholic belief the Translator adheres. Having 
expressed to the esteemed Author his scruples on 
this point, Dr. Cremer has generously replied : " I 
am perfectly content that you should express your 
scruples against my conjectures regarding the pos- 
sibility of a conversion after death ; which, indeed, 
I have given only as conjecture, regarding which 
I believe that there is motive for it in the analogy 
of faith and of the Holy Scripture, inasmuch as it 
does not lie within the scope of the latter to an- 
swer questions of the sort that are ever cropping 
out in connection with Christian thinking. In such 
cases the answer must be sought in a fraternal ex- 
change of opinions in the fellowship of the Spirit 
and of faith." It is the Translator's hope that the 
following observations will be found to reciprocate 
the sentiment so fraternally expressed. 

Every truly Christian mind feels the interest of 
the inquiry, and agrees, submissively to the will of 
God, in wishing that it might be answered as by 
the Author. But even coming to Scripture with 
this favorable* disposition, we are constrained to 
the same conclusion that the Author has expressed 
in regard to the kindred notion of a final restora- 
tion of all things, viz., " We do not find it recorded 
in the archives and doomsday-book of holy love, 
but we do find the contrary expressed." It is proper 
here to confine our remarks to those passages of 
Scripture to which the Author refers, as containing 
intimations of the possibility of conversion after 
8 



114 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

death. Regarding Rom. ii. 12, "For as many as 
have sinned without law shall also perish without 
law ; and as many as have sinned under law shall 
be judged by law," even if we admit that here it is 
expressed that "there are two ways of being lost," 
it is wholly inadmissible to infer that there may be 
similarly two ways of being saved. This passage 
has been commonly taken as the most explicit 
statement of the fact that the heathen that know 
not God perish. The tone of the whole passage 
from which it is taken is to the effect that they are 
sinners, and condemned, and await a day of wrath- 
ful judgment. This idea is maintained in the al- 
ternative sentence quoted. Of the heathen with- 
out law it is said they " perish." Only of those 
that have known Gods law is the issue expressed 
in ambiguous phrase, leaving undetermined wheth- 
er they perish or not ; they " are judged/' 

Regarding 1 Pet. iii. 19, 20, it is well known 
that very many deny that it expresses that Christ 
preached to spirits as they were in Hades ; and 
one may deny this uninfluenced by the position he 
holds on the subject before us. Yet even admit- 
ting our Author's interpretation of what it express- 
es, it does not admit of the inference he would 
make. That Christ preached to the dead is no 
ground for inferring that any other person would 
be sent to do the same. That he preached to those 
of a certain age of the world's history does not ad- 
mit of the inference that he did so to others ; on 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. 115 

the contrary, the exclusive mention of those pre- 
cludes such inference. Moreover, the mention of 
those "heroes of unbelief and wickedness," as the 
Author calls them, the men of Noah's day, and of 
Christ preaching to them in Hades, if it affords an 
inference at all, such as the Author would make, 
would lead us to suppose that the gospel must be 
preached after death even to those who in this life 
have openly resisted God's call to repentance and 
offer of mercy, as those antediluvians did. But 
this notion the Author expressly repudiates. He 
is looking only for hope for such as have had no 
knowledge of God or offer of grace in this life. In 
fact, 1 Pet. iii. 19, 20, as the Author, with others, 
interprets it, offers no grounds for inference of any 
kind, but stands an isolated statement, without 
contextual relationship of thought^ and without a 
parallel or kindred expression anywhere else in 
Scripture. It is in this respect like Melchizedek, 
and needs an inspired interpreter to set forth its 
import, if the interpretation in question be cor- 
rect. 

It is supposed, indeed, by many with our Author 
that 1 Pet. iv. 6 is not only a parallel passage to 
1 Pet. iii. 19, 20, as they interpret the latter, but 
actually a reiteration in clearer terms, that to those 
already dead the gospel was preached ; and they 
find, moreover, in it authority for believing that 
none are to be finally judged without having be- 
fore received the offer of salvation through Christ. 



Il6 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

The passage reads, " For unto- this end was the 
gospel preached even to the dead, that they might 
be judged according to men in the flesh, but live ac- 
cording to God in the spirit." This is a universal 
statement, yet, as the " for this cause" shows, it is 
adduced in corroboration of what is stated in the 
foregoing verse, viz., that blasphemers of Christians 
as such, and so of Christ, shall give account to him 
that is ready to judge the quick and the dead* 
That judgment is near : " the end of all things is at 
hand " (ver. 7). Blasphemers that are dead shall 
not escape it ; for the Judge will call before him 
the living and the dead. And the gospel shall be 
their condemnation ; for it was preached to them 
in the Christians they blasphemed and the good 
lives they reviled. It was preached to them to 
this effect, as it is to all that hear it, viz., that 
though the judgment of fleshly death should fall 
on them, as is the lot of man, yet they might live 
in the spirit according to God. Rejecting what 
was preached, and so dying, it is manifest what 
such must expect in the final judgment. And this 
is said for the re-assurance of believers who may be 
tempted to live as the heathen, and, like the hea- 
then, to " think it strange " that they do not. Such 
is a natural and contextual interpretation of ver. 6 ; 
whereas the view that makes it a statement of the 
general fact that the gospel was preached to those 
already dead, makes of it a statement that has no 
connection with anything in the context, and thus, 



CONVERSION AFTER DEATH. 117 

again, like the similar interpretation of 1 Pet. iii. 
19, 20. 

As for Rev. xx. 11-15, it is expressly said that 
the judgment shall be "according to their works," 
which means the works done in life and not after 
death. And it is obvious that those who were 
" not found written in the book of life " were so not 
found according to those works. And seeing that 
the passage presents the host as gathering to the 
judgment from various regions, Hades being one, 
it is just as legitimate to infer that the latter pro- 
duced only such as were not found written in the 
book of life, as to infer, with our Author, that some 
were and some were not. It is better, however, to 
infer from such apocalyptic representations no doc- 
trine that is not established by clear statements of 
other parts of revelation. 

The Author wisely limits the effect of what he 
represents concerning the possibility of conversion 
after death ; limits it so much as to make it rash 
in the last degree for one to calculate on it for 
himself. Even for others, for whose benefit it is 
conjectured, the prospect admits of so feeble a 
hope, that imagination must have recourse to " the 
inventive love of God," and commend them to 
that. Meanwhile, however, revelation gives no in- 
timation that the offer of salvation to those al- 
ready in the realm of death is the invention of the 
love of God. — 7r.] 



THE DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 



THE 

DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 



"Ach, es ist ein bittres Leiden, 
Und ein reenter Myrrhentrank, 
Sich von seinen Kindern scheiden 
Durch den schweren Todesgang. 
Da geschieht ein Herzensbrechen, 
Das kein Mund recht kann aussprechen." 



"Ah! it causes bitter smarting, 

And a draught of myrrh we drink, 

When from little children parting 
At the grave's relentless brink. 

Hearts are breaking then with grief 

Which in words finds no relief." 

Do not Paul Gerhardt's words find an 
echo in our hearts? Can you describe to 
man what you have gone through beside 
the little bed of your poor dying child? 
Even the old Greek Herodotus regarded it 
as a much sadder thing when children were 
buried by their parents, than when parents 



122 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

were buried by their children. True, it is 
appointed unto men once to die, and death 
is suffering that we all must bear, even if 
we have no right to complain of it. But 
since the revelation of the patience of God 
there in Paradise, man should not die in- 
stantly, not right away or soon after his 
birth. Even in the Scripture it is regarded 
as an excess of the dominion of death, if I 
may so speak, at least as something more 
unnatural than death in general, that " chil- 
dren are there who do not attain their days, 
or old men that do not fulfil their years " 
(Isa. lxv. 20 ; comp. Ps. cii. 24-28). Old and 
satisfied with life, like the patriarchs, so 
at least it might and ought to be, if once 
one must die. In time man can receive in 
faith the seed of eternal life that God's grace 
sows, and bring forth fruit with patience. 

Yet are not, perhaps, the half of mankind 
borne to the grave before they know what 
it means to live ? How should parents un- 
derstand it? what should they say? what 
should console them when their little in- 
fants precede them? Still, that admits of 
the answer : that they should give them up 



THE DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 1 23 

and become used to suffering. But why 
are the children born? and what becomes 
of them, seeing they were not able to " lay 
hold on eternal life?" (i Tim.vi. 12). And 
what profit have the infants themselves of 
being born, beside pains they could not tell 
of, and loving care that they could not un- 
derstand ? 

Thank God ! His word gives the answer! 

First of all this is fixed, that no man 
comes into the world for whom the Saviour 
did not come and die and rise again ; no 
man who is not destined according to God's 
eternal counsel to participate in his blessed 
kingdom. So has it been from the begin- 
ning. There had not another man been 
born after the fall of Adam, were it not to 
be with reference to the promised Saviour. 
Were it not so, Adam and Eve would not 
have remained in this life. There has never 
been a man in the zvorld who did not first 
of all oiue his birth to the Saviour \ to what- 
ever beside he might owe it. " That was 
the true light which lighteth every man " 
(John i. 9). 

Thus it is involved in the very fact of 



124 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

our birth that we should be called to the 
kingdom of God and his glory. One may 
say that birth is the beginning of the call- 
ing, and it concerns us who live to make 
our calling and election sure, and have our- 
selves founded and established (2 Pet. i. 10, 
1 1 ; 1 Cor. i. 8, etc.). 

But to the children who do and can 
know nothing of this we apply the sad and 
yet so consoling saying of Paul, as we apply 
it also to so many others, " Death reigned 
even over them that had not sinned after 
the likeness of Adam's transgression " (Rom. 
v. 14). Death has become a power in the 
world to which others become a sacrifice 
beside those that have themselves incurred 
that penalty. And this is true especially 
in the case of infants who live and die with- 
out any will of their own, before they know 
and understand how and wherefore they 
should live. Therefore death is especially 
an enemy to them. Should it be able to 
hinder them from becoming blessed, from 
inheriting eternal life, these who have not 
"judged themselves unworthy of eternal 
life?" (Acts xiii. 46). By no means ! 



THE DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 1 25 

The dominion of him who has the power 
of death, i.e., the devil, is broken (Heb. ii. 
14). For those who have experienced, or 
recognize that death is their enemy, there 
stands the written word, " The last enemy 
that is abolished is death " (i Cor. xv. 26). 
Now so many must suffer under the ruin 
that has come into the world through sin, 
and yet who know not why they were born. 
Many an infant is born only to die again 
right away. In the resurrection of the 
dead all will become clear. There, whoever 
is here born to suffering can find rich com- 
pensation. There it will appear that our 
children who died early were not born in 
vain ; that they, too, were born for the glo- 
ous liberty of the children of God. 

What the apostle says of the time when 
sin was dead in him, and of the time when 
sin revived, and he thereby died, t. e. y he 
fell under condemnation as it proclaims it- 
self in death and as it shapes the whole life 
before death (Rom. vii. 8-10), that deserves 
attention. There is a difference between 
death and death. For him in whom sin 
has not revived in that decided manner as 



126 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

sin, as opposition to the law of God, death 
is not what it is for others, the beginning 
of doom and of the end. This, of course, 
is only for the sake of Christ, to whom our 
children like ourselves are indebted for life, 
and on this account for what of itself ac- 
crues to men from the redemption. The 
apostle recognizes a " bringing forth fruit 
unto death " (Rom. vi. 21 ; vii. 5) ; and this 
in the natural man is correspondingly the 
same as the " attaining unto the resurrec- 
tion of the dead" (Phil. iii. 11) in the re- 
generated man. From all this may we not> 
must we not, indeed, make the inference — 
the more one has suffered under the dis- 
turbed and perverted arrangement of the 
world occasioned by sin, without any spe- 
cial concurrence in himself, the more richly 
will the Lord indemnify him? To this let 
us add that, according to 1 Cor. vii. 14, the 
children of a believing father, or of a be- 
lieving mother, from the very fact that they 
are such, have part in the communion of 
God ; and that obtains here on earth. But 
if that is true for this world and for living 
children, how much more may it be true of 



THE DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. i2f 

dead children, that for Christ's sake the 
kingdom of heaven is opened to them ! I 
say simply this : If the dying children do 
not become blessed, then tve should not bap- 
tize the living children. 

Let it not be said, however, if, then, the 
children become blessed, why do not all 
men die as children ? In the first place, we 
must not die m order to be blessed, but 
live. Only death should not hinder us 
from becoming blessed ; it should not sep- 
arate us from it (Rom. viii. 35 sqq. ; 1 Cor. 
iii. 22 sq.). And then we should not be 
influenced in our feelings by the thought 
that our children are in good keeping, but 
should proceed from and hold fast to this, 
that they have suffered so early under the 
consequences of sin and without like trans- 
gression, whereas we are still spared. 

Accordingly, thy child is in good keep- 
ing to the great day of redemption, as are 
all the children of God gone home to glory. 
Thy child is blessed, O troubled woman, 
and awaits a blessed resurrection. It is not, 
indeed, an angel. No man becomes an an- 
gel when he dies. But it is in the fellow- 



128 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ship of the angels (Heb. xii. 22 ; Luke xvi. 
22 ; Heb. 1. 14). We shall all become more 
than the angels ; we become the first-fruits 
of the creatures of God (James i. 18) ; and in 
respect to nature we shall be as the angels 
(Mark xii. 25 ; Luke xx. 36); so that Paul 
Gerhardt is right — 

"Aber das, was wir beweinen, 

Weiss hiervon ganz lauter nichts, 
Sondern sieht die Sonne scheinen 

Und den Glanz des ew'gen Lichts, 
Singt und springt und hort die Scharen, 
Die hier seine Wachter waren." 



"But the child of our repining 

Knows naught of our woful plight, 
But beholds the sunlight shining, 

Splendor of eternal light, 
Sings and springs and hears the choir 
That below his guardians were." 

But now one thing more : Do the chil- 
dren remain children? Certainly not ! Even 
on earth it is misery when a child remains 
a child. That cannot be in the kingdom of 
heaven. But all children of God must eter- 
nally be as the children (Mark x. 14). And 
yet the child will not lose its youth ; for 



THE DEATH OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 1 29 

heaven and eternity are the country and 
the season of eternal youth (2 Cor. iv. 16; 
Ps. xcii. 14; Rev. xxii. 1, 2). I also believe 
I may infer from many intimations of Script- 
ure that it will be visible what one has es- 
pecially been on earth, or what has befallen 
him especially (e.g.. Rev. v. 6 ; vi. 1 1 ; Dan. 
xii. 3). What a joy to find our children 
again, grown up and flourishing in the ful- 
ness of eternal youth, as the roses whose 
dew the Lord himself is ! (Hos. xiv. 5.) 

Therefore, whoever, with breaking heart, 
stands by the sick and dying bed of a dear 
child, let him in faith bless it for its final 
passage, and surrender it into the hands of 
the Saviour, even if the lips refuse the 
words. Angels will bear it company. We 
may, and even must, in many respects believe 
for others. The Saviour does not receive 
only living children, nor only well-behaved 
children. There may have been among 
those mentioned, Mark x. 13, many a child 
that, spite of its tender age, gave its moth- 
er trouble enough ; many a mother may 
have brought her naughty child to the 
Saviour with a specially longing heart on 
9 



130 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

that account, that he might bless it. His 
love will more mightily win the heart of 
the child, and knows better how to woo it 
faithfully than the most faithful parental 
love would have been able to do. 

"Wandelt eure Klag in Singen* 

1st doch nunmehr alles gut. 
Trauern mag nicht wiederbringen 

Was im Himmelsschosse runt* 
Aber wer getrost sich giebet, 
1st bei Gott sehr hoch geliebet." 



* Change your weeping into singing. 

All will now be for the best. 
Mourning never can be bringing 

Children back from heavenly rest.. 
They who boldly self resign 
Are received to love divine. 5 * 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 



Spiritualism [German : spiritisin\ is one 
of the most repugnant manifestations in the 
sphere of spiritual and religious life, and 
one of the most lying distortions of the 
truth. What it pretends to offer, the Chris- 
tian, in the first place, has no need of, and, 
in the second, cannot attempt to make use 
of without imperilling his faith and salva- 
tion. The way in which something is os- 
tensibly offered to him would be for him, 
under all circumstances, a way to deep and 
grievous backsliding, even to apostasy, were 
he only to take even one step in it. Under 
such circumstances it is quite unimportant 
whether the performances of Spiritualism 
are real, or only pretence and lies. They 
are, however, the latter. 

What Spiritualism proposes to offer is the 
proof of the existence of a world of spirits, 



134 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

and the possibility of intercourse with it. 
The proof is to the Christian superfluous. 
For it does not even demand the Christian 
consciousness, as determined by faith, but 
only that fear of God that is universal, in 
order to know that death does not end all, 
but that, on the contrary, there is for us 
all an existence beyond the grave and a 
realm of the dead, a world of departed spir- 
its. On this subject the Christian, by rea- 
son of his faith in the Saviour, knows even 
something more, that no one knows or can 
know without this faith. And still further 
he knows that there is a world of spirits, 
whose members are not derived from the 
world of men, but are angels of God, who 
are sent forth to a service on account of 
them that are to inherit salvation ; and bad 
angels — angels that have sinned, whose cap- 
tain is the devil, who abides not in truth. 
The Scripture-believing Christian has not 
only no ground for doubting this, but every 
reason for believing it in connection with 
what he knows on the testimony of God 
concerning his Saviour and salvation. 
But he must unqualifiedly and from first 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 135 

to last repel every solicitation to assure 
himself by experiments of the existence of 
that world of spirits, and so he must aprio- 
rally characterize the results of such experi- 
ments as lies, if not as something still worse. 
He cannot for a moment put himself on 
the footing of negotiation and investigation 
with Spiritualism, but can only brand it as 
a lie oppugnant to God, as deception and 
self-deception of unbelief, and deplore the 
fact when earnest spirits, perhaps in the in- 
terest of science or forsooth of faith, have 
dealings with it. Science has as little as 
faith to expect from that quarter by way 
of promoting its interests. And those who 
would appreciate Spiritualism, as they sup- 
pose, in the interest of apologetics, more 
than increase the dangers of apologetics, 
that are already great enough. Such at- 
tempts are in roughest contrast with the 
Saviour's course of conduct, who would and 
could make no use of the testimony of evil 
spirits to him and his cause. 

Intercourse on our part with the dead, 
and intercourse of the dead with us, is im- 
possible. To attempt such intercourse, 



136 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

however, is wicked ; for it is not merely 
aimless, but also a hinderance of the faith 
that God the Lord requires in respect to 
his word and his Holy Spirit. If unbelief 
is resisting the Holy Spirit, it does not 
cease to be that when one would believe 
the spirits. 

This intercourse with spirits is impossi- 
ble, because death separates from the life 
on this side of the grave. The dead in the 
realm of death have no more power over 
themselves, but are held and bound by 
the consequences of death, whose essence is 
complete impotence of life. If death is the 
natural and judicial consequence of sin, are 
these consequences manifest in it, then it 
is not to be thought of that the dead in 
Hades can still hold intercourse with the 
hither world that they have left, though 
they might very much wish to do so. A 
devouring longing for what they have left 
behind may so much the more fill them, 
the less they have become inwardly allied 
to, or may ally themselves to, the blessed 
existence in the communion of God. But 
that is just their misery, that past and fut- 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 137 

ure are sunk out of sight in the unblessed 
present of death and Hades. Wishes, de- 
sires, cravings are not extinct, for the soul 
and they are united. No guilt is gone ; yet 
they themselves can never expiate it, and 
have no expiation. Gladly would they set 
many a thing to rights, make up for neglect, 
make amends for faults, like the rich man, 
but — and that is just the misery of the 
doom that has begun in them — it is now 
too late. In thousands of cases the belief 
in ghosts may be the expression of sympa- 
thy in this dreadful misery of those who 
can never come back, not even for a mo- 
ment, to the places of their guilt that they 
have left. They ought, indeed, now to be 
bound. 

Thus there is no possibility of establish- 
ing on our side any intercourse with the 
dead in the realm of death, or of producing 
an apparition of those deceased. The realm 
of death opens only to receive the deceased, 
not the living ; and those who are there 
are chained and bound by the sentence of 
God, and the hour is yet to come when 
also the realm of death must give up its 



138 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

dead, that the final judgment may take 
place. Those, however, who may perhaps 
be preserved there unto life await the hour 
of their divine deliverance. Neither they 
themselves nor others can even for a mo- 
ment open to them the world on this side 
the grave. Our contact with the realm of 
death consists in the presentiment of death 
and judgment ; and of that another part of 
the belief in ghosts may be the expression. 

With regard, however, to the blessed who 
are in heaven, the question whether they 
may come back, even for brief moments, 
falls to the ground of itself ; and that we 
can at least constrain them to do so is total- 
ly out of the question. What they might, 
perhaps, be able or wish to do to those 
whom they have left behind, for that God's 
angels are better ministers and messen- 
gers ; and they are not their messengers 
but God's, whose providential care for us 
here below cannot be excelled by the love 
of those who. have gone before us. 

Therefore we are able to explain how it 
is that Spiritualism, like all other belief in 
ghosts, shows a partiality for spirits un- 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 139 

blessed, which, however, even the rich man 
in the parable did not regard as proper to 
give instruction. Jugglery and lies have 
all along been its instruments and perform- 
ances, except when God turned the frivo- 
lous play into earnest, as in the case of the 
witch of Endor. But then this happens for 
a judgment on him that has become as 
depraved as Saul. And woe to him who 
invokes God's judgment on himself! 

There is something of yet graver import 
to be said concerning this pretended inter- 
course with the higher world of spirits. 
The Christian knows how it is with the 
angels of God and their destination. It is 
not the Christian but God who has power 
over them ; and they are not at the dis- 
posal of the Christian's will, but God sends 
them for the service of his own. But least 
of all can a Christian, without detriment 
to his faith and salvation, propose to claim 
their service with a view to awaking, pre- 
serving, and promoting his faith, in contra- 
diction of Heb. ii. 2 sq. ; Gal. iii. 19 sqq. 
For the time is gone by for that ministry 
of the angels that they had to perform to 



140 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

God under the old dispensation (Heb. viii. 
13). And to seek their ministry as a me- 
diation of faith is nothing but unbelief in 
the mediatorship of Christ and in the pres- 
ence of the Holy Spirit, and is the way to 
apostasy (Col. ii. 18 sq.). The very attempt 
to influence the angels is a moral and relig- 
ious impossibility for the Christian while he 
abides in faith ; not to mention that such 
an attempt is a physical impossibility, ow- 
ing to the articulated order of the whole 
creation. It must in every respect turn out 
an attempt at intercourse with the world of 
evil spirits. 

But even this intercourse is not in the 
power of man. The hour will indeed come, 
when the lost will open their eyes on the 
company in which they are at present found. 
Till then, however, while they live in this 
body, no man can apprehend by his senses, 
not even by that of touch and feeling, the 
extra-mundane world and its being. For 
this it is necessary that one should be lifted 
above the limitations of the perceptive fac- 
ulty by what the Holy Scripture calls ec- 
stasy, seeing visions, etc. But man is not 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 141 

able to effect this of himself. It comes 
about like all those miraculous transactions 
that sacred history presents, and which be- 
long to the great problems of the history 
of salvation that came to pass between God 
and mankind, and whose season is past, now 
that the redemption is made and the Holy 
Spirit is present until the end comes (Matt, 
xxiv. 24 ; 2 Thess. ii. 9). 

It is as much out of man's power to in- 
fluence the evil world of spirits as to influ- 
ence the dead and angels. And the infor- 
mation concerning pretended facts of the 
kind has in all ages the same appearance. 
For one acquainted with the history of su- 
perstition, the proceedings in spiritualistic 
circles have a desperate likeness to what is 
contained in judicial records of the period 
of trials for witchcraft. But the whole 
substance of witchcraft is demonstrably 
nothing else than a toughly enduring rem- 
nant of the heathenism of our ancestors. 
A look into Grimm's and Simrock's " Ger- 
man Mythology" affords the fullest solu- 
tion of this subject. And whoever has un- 
derstandingly read Jung Stilling's " Theory 



142 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

of the Science of Spirits" finds, in all report- 
ed manifestations of spirits, the reproduc- 
tion of the forms of the old myths of gods 
and heroes, only become devoid of marrow 
and mettle by reason of age. Not even the 
blow of the hand, and the impression of the 
hand with the fingers in the form of a brand, 
is wanting, nor the breathing on one, etc. 
In this respect Spiritualism is nothing but 
a new edition of this old superstition, or 
rather heathenism, in modern and genteel 
dress. Every physician and spiritual advis- 
er of the insane of a lunatic asylum knows 
of these supposed observations of facts. 
They are hallucinations that no healthy 
person experiences, but which can only be 
recognized as such by one who has learned 
to know when a person is really insane — a 
task which, as is well known, is not always 
easy, and which even Blumhardt was not 
always equal to in his earlier days. 

On the other hand, a Christian will be far 
from denying that the evil world of spirits 
may extend its influence into the world this 
side of the grave, and that they may pro- 
duce effects on men. But what advantage 



CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM. 1 43 

to Spiritualism is there in this ? Were there 
anywhere something of the sort as actual 
fact, we would have to recognize in the so- 
called mediums that grievous form of sick- 
ness that we find as demoniacal possession 
in the days when the Lord walked on earth, 
and w T ith which a Christian man could not 
meddle in any way but to heal it, according 
to the direction of the Lord (Matt. xvii. 21). 
And shall a Christian man, spite of Mark 
i. 34, make any account of such manifesta- 
tions in any sort of apologetic interest? 
The sole apology would be the rebuke : 
" Be silent and hold thy peace," of Mark h 
25 ; and whoever is not in condition to do 
that has every reason to withhold his hand, 
and were it only his pen, from things that 
could ruin him. But that there is still at 
present, or that there is again at present, 
such power permitted to evil spirits as once 
appeared in the form of demoniacal pos- 
session, must be doubted on the ground of 
Matt. viii. 29 ; Mark i. 24 sq. ; Luke x. 18 ; 
John xii. 31 ; xvi. II. In the so-called me- 
diums w r e can see nothing else than persons 
who are physically and morally depraved, 



144 BEYOND THE GRAVE. 

ruined by debauchery, avarice, pride, or 
unbelief, so that they no longer have the 
mastery of themselves. They are persons 
who, having no longer a will of their own, 
are under the condemnation of their sin 
and their disease, and are on the surest 
road to utter ruin in body and soul. 

If there are Christian people that meddle 
with these manifestations in any other spirit 
than that of a self-contained seriousness 
that censures and renounces them, of com- 
passionate love and godly faith ; if they en- 
tertain even an atom of faith in the reality 
of what, under the most favorable view of 
it, is lying and jugglery, and thus is just as 
satanic as if it were the immediate effect of 
the devil and his angels, let them lay to 
heart the warning against having fellowship 
with the unfruitful works of darkness (Eph. 
v. n). The danger that even the elect may 
be deceived (Matt. xxiv. 24) and seduced 
into error exists also at the present day. 



INDEX. 



Angels, Men do not become, 127. 

Pretended Intercourse with, 139. 
Apologetics and Spiritualism, 143. 
Apostasy, Spiritualism the Way to, 133, 140. 

Baptism of Infants without Reason ; if dying Infants are 

not blessed, 127. 
Beyond the Grave, What is not obscure, 1 sqq. 

has a History, past, present, future, 13 sqq. 

previous to Christ's Redemption, 29 sqq., 42. 

The Prospect, changed when Christ came, 51, 54. 
Birth to present Life due primarily to Christ, 123. 

the beginning of the Heavenly Calling, 124. 
Bliss of the Intermediate State, 71 sq. 

of Heaven, 83 sqq. 

Are there Degrees of, in Heaven ? 94 sqq. 

of Heaven not molested by the Torments of the Lost, 
102 sq. 
Body, Importance of the, 19 sq. 

its Share in Redemption and Eternal Life, 20, 21, 70. 

transmits Sin and Death, 22. 

the first to feel the Effects of Death, 22, 23. 

and Soul not independent, 21. 

Children of believing Parents, 126. 

deceased, do not remain Children, 128. 

Herodotus on the Death of, 121. 
Christ, Descent of, into Hades, 53. 
IO 



146 INDEX. 

Christ could not be held of Death, 53. 
Conversion after Death, 80, 104 sqq. 

Death not a Debt of Nature, 21. 

The Moral significance of, 21, 22. 

not a Friend, but Enemy, 21, 26, 88, 124. 

What is it ? 23, 24, 30 sq. 

How long it reigns, 41 sq., 50 sq. 

The Reign of, broken, 54 sq., 125. 

The Reign of, 63 sq. 

of Infants, 63, 121 sqq. 

The Second, or Other, 79, 101. 

Conversion after, 80, 104 sqq. 

What makes a blessed ? 89 sqq. 

of Unbelievers since Christ, 99 sqq. 

Early Death unnatural, 92, 122. 

A Difference between Death and Death, 125 sq. 

could not hold Christ, 53. 
Demoniacal Possessions, 143 sq. 

Easter, The Future and Second, 13 sqq., 65, 82. 

Ecstasy, 140. 

Endor, The Witch of, 139. 

Enoch and Elijah translated, 52. 

Future Life expected by Old Testament Saints, 42 sqq. 
Why so little mention of, in the Old Testament? 

44 sqq. 
World, The Certainty of, I sqq. 

Belief in a, universal, 3. 

admitted by Philosophy, 4. 

Materialism and the Doctrine of a, 5 sq. 

presents a Dark Problem, 8 sq. 

illumined only by Scripture, 10 sqq. 

Plato's Sentiment, 10 sq. 

not unknown to the Hebrews, 42 sq. 



INDEX. 147 

Gerhardt, Paul, Hymn, 121, 128, 130. 

Hades, History of, 12 sq., 29 sqq. 

a Vestibule, 33 sq., 109. 

the Common Goal of all before Christ, 34 sq. 

The Different States of the Righteous and the Wicked 
in, before Christ, 38 sq. 

Why, for all before Christ ? 40 sq. 

Christ's Descent into, 53. 

no Place for Believers now, 83 sqq. 

The Change in respect to, 84. 

Is the Gospel preached in ? 104 sqq. 
Heathen, Are the, lost, 104 sqq. 

Is the Gospel preached to the, in Hades? 104 sqq. 
Heaven first opened to men by Christ, 52, 85. 

the Place of Bliss, 53, 71 sq. 

the Present Goal of Believers, 83 sqq. 

an Intermediate State, 86. 

Waiting part of the Bliss of, 86. 

Distinctions in the Heavenly State, 99. 

Bliss of, not molested by the Pains of the Lost, 102 
sq. 

the Place of Eternal Youth, 129. 
Herodotus on the Death of Children, 121 sq. 
Holiness, How is, perfected after Death, 93 sqq. 

Immortality, inferior to Redemption, 16 sqq. 

not consoling without Redemption of the Body, 24- 
26. 
Infants, The death of 63, 122 sqq. 

Why do they die ? 122 sqq. 

Death especially the Enemy, of, 124. 

who die not born in vain, 125. 

Baptism of, 127. 

Why do not all die as, 127. 

in good keeping when they die, 127. 



I48 INDEX. 

Infants dying do not remain Infants, 128. 

naughty as well as good, received by Christ, 129. 

Judgment, The Last, to be determined by one's Relation 
to Christ, 107. 

Life Eternal, 27, 28. 

See Future Life, World. 

Plato on Future Life, 10 sq. 

Redemption more than Immortality, 16 sqq. 

of the Body, 20, 21, 70. 
Restoration of All Things, 100, 103. 
Resurrection the Redress of Evils suffered, 64, 125. 
guaranteed by Christian Experience, 65 sqq. 
of Christ, The Meaning of, 55 sq., 60 sqq. 
not till Christ has been preached to all, 82. 
how effected, 74. 
of the Wicked, 78. 
The First and Second, 78, 80. 
Hope, 14 sqq., 45 sqq. 

essential to Christianity, 15 sqq. 

Why so late in finding Expression in Revelation? 29. 

and Hope of the Messiah identical, 48 sqq. 

Doctrinal Importance of, 58 sqq. 

how related to Salification, 72 sqq. 

Refinements of the, to be discountenanced, 74. 

Sanctification, Relation of, to Resurrection, 72 sqq. 

Sheol. See Hades. 

Sin an attempt at Independence of God, 22. 

Effects of, on Soul and Body, 22. 
Soul, The, a Ruin, 22. 

and Body not independent, 21. 

What the, experiences in dying, 23, 24. 



INDEX. 149 

Spirits, Intercourse with, impossible, 136 sqq. 

Men cannot summon evil, 140. 
Spiritualism, 133 sqq. 

the Way to Apostasy, 133. 

Pretence and Lies, 133, 139. 

The Christian has no Need of what it offers, 134. 

The Christian believes more than, 134. 

The Christian must not meddle with, 135, 143, 144. 

partial to Spirits unblessed, 138 sq. 

The Pretended Facts of, 141. 

Resemblance to Witchcraft, 141. 

a Remnant of Heathenism, 141. 

Alleged Facts of, Hallucinations of Insanity, 142. 

and Christian Apologetics, 143. 
Strauss, David, concerning Beyond the Grave, 4. 

Torments of the Lost do not molest Heavenly Bliss, 
102 sq. 

Unbelievers, What the State of, after Death, since 
Christ's Redemption, 99 sqq. 



TEXTS. 





PAGE 


Gen. xxxvii. 35. . . 


.... 35 


xlix. 18 


...39,43 


Exod. iii. 6 


47 


x. 26 


17 


Deut. xxxii. 22 . . . 


■ --- 37 


2 Kings xix. 4 . 


34 


Job vii. 9 


31 


x. 20 sqq 


.... 32 


xix. 25-27 . . . 


.... 46 


Ps. vi. 6 


32 


xvi. 8-1 1 


- . .39, 7*> 


xlix. 15, 16. . . 


---- 37 


lxxxiv. 8 


.... 87 


lxxxviii. 5 . . . 


.... 31 


lxxxix. 48. . . . 


.— 36 


xciu 14 


129 


cii. 24-28 


122 


cxv. 17 


.... 31 


Prov. xiii. 14 ; xv. 


25.. 38 


Eccl. iii. 11 


.... 8 


Isa. xxv. 8 


.... 46" 


xxvi. 19 . 


.... 46 


XXXV11L IO, II 


■ 18, 


19 


.... 31 


xl. 29 sqq. . . . 


.... 87 


Ivii. 1, 2 


.... 39 


lxv. 20 


. . . . 122 


Jer. xxxi. 20 


.... IG2 


Ezek. xvi. 53. . 


10S 


XXXll. . 


.... 33 


XXXVU. 


.... 46 j 



PAGE 

Dan. xil. 2 .46, 78 

xii. 3 129 

Hos. vi. 1 sqq 46 

xiii. 14 46 

xiv. 5 129 

Tobi-t-ii, 17 sqq. 47 

2 Mace. vii. 9 47 

Matt. viii. 29 143 

xi.5 53 

xviL 21 143 

xix.- 27 sqq 64 

xix. 29 102 

xxii. 24 112 

xxiv. 24 141, 144 

xxvii. 52 sqq 54 

Marki. 24 sq., 25,34. . 143 

ix. 9, 10 14 

x. 13 129 

x. 14 12S 

x. 28 sqq. 64 

xil 25. I2S 

Lnke x. 18. . 143 

xiii. 23 sqq .. 112 

xiv. 14 ......... . 64 

xvL 22 . 128 

xx. 35, 36 64,128 

xxiiL 43 ...... 52 

John i. q 123 

v. 25, 28, 29 78 

vi. 39, 40, 44.... 57, 58 

J3QL3L ......... . 143 



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COCKER'S CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHI- 
LOSOPHY ; or, The Relation between Spontaneous 
and Reflective Thought in Greece, and the Positive 
Teaching of Christ and his Apostles. By B. F. Cock- 
er, D.D., LL.D. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 75. 

DEXTER'S CONGREGATIONALISM. The Con- 
gregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, as 
seen in its Literature. With a Bibliographical Index. 
By Henry Martin Dexter. Large 8vo, 1082 pages, 
Cloth, $6 00. 

DWIGHT'S THEOLOGY. Theology Explained and 

Defended, in a Series of Sermons. By Timothy 

Dwight, S.T.D., LL.D. Portrait. 4 vols., 8vo, 
Cloth, $8 00. 



Religious and Theological Works. 3 

DOUGLASS SERIES OF CHRISTIAN GREEK 
AND LATIN WRITERS. i2mo, Cloth, $1 30 per 
volume. 

Latin Hymns. With English Notes. By F. A. March, 
LL.D. — Eusebius. The First Book and Selections. By F. A. 
March, LL.D. — Athenagoras. Edited by F. A. March, LL.D. 
— Tertullian's Select Works. Edited by F. A. March, 
LL.D.— The Apologies of Justin Martyp. With an Intro- 
duction and Notes. By B. L. Gildersleeve, Ph.D. (Gott.), LL.D. 

"FROM DAN TO BEERSHEBA ;" or, The Land of 
Promise as it now Appears. By the Rev. J. P. Newman, 
D.D. Maps and Engravings. i2mo, Cloth, $1 75. 

GIESELER'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. A 
Text-Book of Church History. By Dr. John C. L. 
Gieseler. Translated by Samuel Davidson, LL.D., 
and the Rev. John W. Hull, M.A. New Edition. 
Edited by the Rev. Henry B. Smith, D.D. 8vo, 
Cloth. Vols. I., II., III., and IV., $2 25 each. Vol. 
V., $3 00. 

GREEK NEW TESTAMENT CONCORDANCE. 
The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New 
Testament. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50 ; Sheep, $3 87 ; Half 
Calf, $5 25. 

A SYSTEM OF CHRISTIAN RHETORIC, for the 

Use of Preachers and Other Speakers. By George 
Winfred Hervey. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50. 

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. 
With Maps and Woodcuts. By John F. Hurst, D.D. 
i6mo, Flexible Cloth, 40 cents. 

M'CLINTOCK & STRONG'S CYCLOPAEDIA. A 

Cyclopaedia of Bibical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical 
Literature. By the late Rev. John M'Clintock, 
D.D., and James Strong, S.T.D. With Maps and 
numerous Illustrations. Ten Volumes and one Supple- 
mentary Volume. 8vo. Price per Volume, Cloth, 
$5 00 ; Sheep, $6 00 ; Half Morocco, $8 00. (Sold 
by Subscription only.} 

MILMAN'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. From 
the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the 
Roman Empire. By the Rev. H. H. Milman. 8vo, 
Cloth, $2 00. 



4 Religious and Theological Works. 

MOSHEIM'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. An- 
cient and Modern Ecclesiastical History, in which the 
Rise and Variation of Church Power are Considered in 
their Connection with the State of Learning, Philos- 
ophy, and Political History of Europe. Translated, 
with Notes, etc., by A. Maclaine, D.D. Continued 
to 1826 by C. Coote, LL.D. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, 
$4 00 ; Sheep, $5 00. 

NEAL'S HISTORY OF THE PURITANS, or Prot- 
estant Non - conformists ; from the Reformation in 
15 18 to the Revolution in 1688. By Daniel Neal, 
M.A. With Notes by J. O. Choules, D.D. 2 vols., 
Svo, Cloth, $4 00 ; Sheep, $5 00. 

NORDHOFF'S GOD AND THE FUTURE LIFE : 
The Reasonableness of Christianity. Natural The- 
ology for Youth. By Charles Nordhoff. i6mo, 
Cloth, $1 00. 

PRIME'S TENT-LIFE IN THE HOLY LAND. By 

William C. Prime. Illustrated. i2mo, Cloth, $2 00. 

REVISION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF 
THE NEW TESTAMENT. With an Introduction 
by the Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. 618 pages, 
Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3 00. 

WESTCOTT & HORT'S GREEK NEW TESTA- 
MENT. The New Testament in the Original Greek. 
The Text revised by Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D., 
and F. J. A. Hort, D.D. American Edition. With 
an Introduction by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. 
Vol. I. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 00. Vol. II. Contain- 
ing Introduction and Appendix by the Editors. Crown 
8vo, Cloth, $2 00. 

REVISED GREEK -ENGLISH NEW TESTA- 
MENT. Westcott & Hort's Text of the New Testa- 
ment in the Original Greek, and the Revised English 
Version of the New Testament printed on opposite 
pages. With Dr. Philip Schaff's Introduction to 
Westcott & Hort's Greek New Testament. Crown 
8vo, Half Leather, $3 50. 



Religions and Theological Works. $ 

REVISED VERSION OF THE HOLY BIBLE. In 
One Volume, Brevier, 4to, Cloth, $1 50 ; Sheep, $2 00. 

REVISED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTA- 
MENT. Harper's American Editions : Brevier, i6mo, 
Cloth, 45 cents; Leather, Gilt Edges, 90 cents; i2mo, 
Cloth, 60 cents. Pica, 8vo, Red Edges, $2 00; Divin- 
ity Circuit, Full Morocco, $9 00. 

REVISED VERSION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

In Four Volumes. Pica, 8vo, Cloth, Red Edges, $10 00. 
(Uniform in Size and Typography with Harper's Amer- 
ican Pica Edition of the ' * Revised Version of the New 
Testament.") In Two Volumes. Brevier, i6mo, 
Cloth, $2 50. 

ROBERTSON'S LIFE AND WORKS : 

Life, Letters, Lectures on Corinthians. Large i2mo, Cloth, 
$2 00 ; Half Calf, $3 75. — Sermons Preached at Brighton. 
Large i2mo,Cloth,$2 00; Half Calf,$3 75. — "The Human Race," 
and other Sermons, nmo, Cloth, $1 50; Half Calf, $3 25. 

SCHAFF'S COMPANION TO THE GREEK TES- 
TAMENT AND THE ENGLISH VERSION. By 
Philip Schaff, D.D. With Fac-simile Illustrations 
of the MSS. and Standard Editions of the New Tes- 
tament. Post 8vo, Cloth, $2 75. 

SCHAFF'S CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM. With 
a History and Critical Notes. By the Rev. Phil- 
ip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. Fourth Edition. Three 
Volumes. Vol. I. The History of Creeds. Vol. II. 
The Greek and Latin Creeds, with Translations. Vol. 
III. The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Transla- 
tions. 8vo, Cloth, $15 00. 

SERMONS BY BISHOP MATTHEW SIMPSON, of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church. Edited, from Short- 
hand Reports, by George R. Crooks, D.D. 8vo, 
Cloth, $2 50. 

SOUTHEY'S LIFE OF JOHN WESLEY, and Rise 
and Progress of Methodism. By Robert Southey. 
With Notes by S. T. Coleridge, and Remarks by 
Alexander Knox. 2 vols., i2mo, Cloth, $2 50. 



6 Religious and Theological Works, 

TAYLOR'S (W. M.) WORKS. Works by the Rev. 
William M. Taylor, D.D., Pastor of the Broadway- 
Tabernacle, New York. i2mo, Cloth, $i 50 per vol. 

David King of Israel. — Elijah the Prophet.— Peter the 
Apostle. — Daniel the Beloved.— Moses the Law-Giver. — 
Paul the Missionary. Illustrated. 

THE LAND AND THE BOOK. By William M. 
Thomson, D.D. Forty -five Years a Missionary in 
Syria and Palestine. In Three Volumes. Profusely Il- 
lustrated. Square 8vo, Cloth, $6 00 ; Sheep, $7 00 ; 
Half Morocco, $8 50 ; Full Morocco, Gilt Edges, 
$10 00 ; — per volume. 

Vol. I. Southern Palestine and Jerusalem. With 140 Il- 
lustrations and Maps. 

Vol. II. Central Palestine and Phoenicia. With 130 Il- 
lustrations and Maps. 

Vol. III. Lebanon, Damascus, and Beyond Jordan. With 
147 Illustrations and Maps. {Just Ready.) 

THOMSON'S GREAT ARGUMENT. The Great 
Argument ; or, Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. By 
W. H. Thomson, M.A., M.D., Professor of Materia 
Medica and Therapeutics, Medical Department Uni- 
versity of New York. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 00. 

TRISTRAM'S LAND OF MOAB: Travels and Dis- 
coveries on the East Side of the Dead Sea and the Jor- 
dan. By H.B.Tristram, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. Map 
and Illustrations. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

TYERMAN'S OXFORD METHODISTS. Memoirs 
of the Rev. Messrs. Clayton, Ingham, Gambold, Her- 
vey, and Boughton, with Biographical Notices of others. 
By the Rev. Luke Tyerman. With Portraits. Crown 
8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

TYERMAN'S LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN WES- 
LEY, Founder of the Methodists. By the Rev. Luke 
Tyerman. Three Steel Portraits. 3 vols. , Crown 8vo, 
Cloth, $7 50. 

VAN-LENNEP'S BIBLE LANDS : Their Modern Cus- 
toms and Manners Illustrative of Scripture. By the 
Rev. Henry J. Van-Lennep, D.D. Maps and Illus- 
trations. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Sheep, $6 00; Half Calf, 
$8 00. 



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